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Miss Katharine Tynan 



FROM THE PORTRAIT BY J. B VEATS. R.H.A. 
IN THE DUBLIN MUNICIPAL ART GALLERY 



Twenty-five Years 
Reminiscences 



BY 



KATHARINE TYNAN v 

Author of "Her Ladyship," "Mary Gray," "Men and Maids," etc. 




NEW YORK 
THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY 

437 Fifth Avenue 



-^ 



Copyright, 191 3, by 
THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY 



OFC 31 1913 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 



My Father 
Mists and Shadows 
Life and Death 
Childhood 
School Days . 
The Good Years 



CHAPTER II 
CHAPTER III 
CHAPTER IV 
CHAPTER V 
CHAPTER VI 



CHAPTER VII 
The Land League . 

CHAPTER VIII 
The Troubled Times 

CHAPTER IX 

1882-83 

CHAPTER X 
Early Friends 

CHAPTER XI 
Discursive .... 

CHAPTER XII 
Friends Old and New 

CHAPTER XIII 
The Adventure of the Lady in Black 

CHAPTER XIV 
Annus Mirabilis .... 

CHAPTER XV 
The Rossettis and Others 

CHAPTER XVI 
Mr. Elwin and Lord Lytton 

[v] 



PAGE 
I 



24 

34 
45 
54 
70 
81 
96 
107 
120 

134 
146 

155 
161 

175 
186 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XVII 
1886 

CHAPTER XVIII 
1886-87 

CHAPTER XIX ' 
Chiefly Rose Kavanagh . 

CHAPTER XX 
Frances Wynne . . . . 

CHAPTER XXI 
Frances Wynne (Continued) 

CHAPTER XXII 
Lady Young and Her Circle 

CHAPTER XXIII 
Theosophists in Dublin . 

CHAPTER XXIV 
W. B. Yeats 

CHAPTER XXV 
W. B. Yeats: Some Letters 

CHAPTER XXVI 

1888 

CHAPTER XXVII 

1888-89 

CHAPTER XXVIII 
1889 

CHAPTER XXIX 
1889-90 ...... 

CHAPTER XXX 
The Parnell Split . . . . 

CHAPTER XXXI 

1891 

CHAPTER XXXII 
The Night . . . . . 

[ vi ] 



PAGE 

. 204 

216 

.. 230 

,. 242 

. 256 

. 267 

• 277 
. 289 
. 300 

• 311 
. 324 

• 337 

• 353 
. 368 
. 380 

• 391 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Katharine Tynan Frontispiece ' 

FACING PAGE 

Andrew Tynan 14- 

Bee Walshe 86^ 

Margaret Walshe 86 

John E. Redmond 100 

Charles S. Parnell 100 

Fanny Parnell 100 

May Nally 100 

Father Matthew Russell, SJ 120 

Wilfrid Blunt (in prison dress) 130' 

William Redmond 130 

Michael Davitt 130 

Lady Wilde 140 

Jane Barlow 140 

Oscar Wilde 148 

Emily Skeffington Thompson 160 

Rev. Henry Stuart Fagan 160 

Charles Gregory Fagan , . 160 

Mrs. Alice Meynell ......... 160 

Lord Russell of Killowen 176' 

Gabriel Dante Rossetti 184 

Christina Rossetti 184 

William Rossetti 184 

Mrs. William Rossetti 184 

Sir Samuel Ferguson . . 210 

[ vil ] 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

John Boyle O'Reilly 210' 

T. D. Sullivan 220^ 

John O'Leary 232-^ 

Ellen O'Leary 232'^ 

Dr. Douglas Hyde, An Craoibhin Aoibhinn . . 232 ' 

Dr. George Sigerson 246^ 

Charles J. Kickham 246"^ 

George W. Russell (A.E.) 280 

W. B. Yeats 294"^ 

Alfred M. Williams 306^ 

Lady Young 306'' 

Sir Frederick Leighton 306'^ 

John J. Piatt 306 

Louise Imogen Guiney 320^^ 

Dr. James Legge 320 

General Sir William Butler 332^ 

William Ewart Gladstone 342^ 

Lord Randolph Churchill 342 ^ 

Maude Gonne 342-^ 

William Morris 354'^ 

AvoNDALE 364^ 

Dr. Joseph E. Kenny 380-'^^'^ 

Ethna Carberry 380 '''5^ 

John Clancy 380 ^'^'^ 

Timothy C. Harrington . 380 ' 7 ^ ' 

Charles S. Parnell (during his last illness) . 392 



[ viii ] 



You were a part of the green country, 

Of the grey hills and the quiet places. 
They are not the same, the fields and the mountains, 

Without the lost and beloved faces, 
And you were a part of the sweet country. 

There's a road that winds by the foot of the mountains 
Where I run in my dreams and you come to meet me, 

With your blue eyes and your cheeks' old roses, 
The old fond smile that was quick to greet me. 

They are not the same, the fields and mountains. 

There is something lost, there is something lonely, 
The birds are singing, the streams are calling. 

The sun's the same and the wind in the meadows, 
But o'er your grave are the shadows falling, 

The soul is missing, and all is lonely. 

It is what they said: you were part of the country. 
You were never afraid of the wind and weather, 

I can hear in dreams the feet of your pony. 
You and your pony coming together, 

You will drive no more through the pleasant country. 

You were a part of the fields and mountains, 

Everyone knew you, everyone loved you, 
All the world was your friend and neighbour. 

The women smiled and the men approved you. 
They are not the same, the fields and the mountains. 

I sigh no more for the pleasant places, 
The longer I've lost you the more I miss you. 

My heart seeks you in dreams and shadows. 
In dreams I find you, in dreams I kiss you. 

And wake, alas! to the lonely places. 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS: REMINISCENCES 
CHAPTER I 

MY FATHER 

Of my father I desire to speak without a word of mourning. 
It is now seven years since he died, and I no longer feel it a 
profane thing to think of him or to speak of him as he was. 
His was so strong a personality, so living, that the note of 
mourning seems out of place. Somewhere he goes on living 
still, intensely human, simple, robust, great-hearted, kind. 

In whatever position of life he might have been born, he 
would always have been unlike his fellows. He was born to 
the country pursuits. Although the actual place of his birth 
was an old Dublin street under the shadow of Dublin Castle 
walls, practically from the beginning his business and his 
place were with flocks and herds, in the rich fields lying 
southwestward of Dublin, under the beautiful mild hills. 

He said he went to school in Hoey's Court, off Werburgh 
Street, the very school which boasted of Dean Swift as a 
scholar. Round about the spot where he was born the streets 
are storied: the very stones cry the names and the fates 
of Irish patriots. In St. Werburgh's Church, close to where 
he was born, the brothers Sheares were buried. Practically 
the whole bloody history of Ireland under the English occu- 
pation has Dublin Castle for its centre. As one goes up 
and down those dark streets — they are lighter now than they 
were in my girlhood or his boyhood — what shades elbow 
each other! Tragical shades! If you are interested in the 
social side of Dublin life, you will look for your ghosts 
about the old Parliament Houses and Trinity College. In 

[I] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

College Green was Daly's Club-House, where all the wits 
and beaux and swashbucklers and fine gentlemen of every 
sort congregated in the brilliant years of the eighteenth 
century that led up to the debacle of the Rebellion. About 
Dublin Castle the memories are mostly sombre. There is 
an aura, the environing light of patriots and martyrs, in 
those streets. Impossible, one would say, for a child of 
imagination to grow up there anything but a patriot. 

His mind in later years was an epitome of old Dublin. 
You could scarcely talk of any famous person or happening 
that it would not set him off on a reminiscence. He was 
brought up by his grandfather and grandmother, and for- 
tunately for him his youth was spent mainly on his grand- 
father's farm at Cheeverstown, Co. Dublin, rather than in 
the dark streets. His feeling towards his grandparents 
was more than filial. He was always quoting them in later 
life. If you grumbled at the weather, he would say : "Ah, 
well, as my poor grandfather used to say : 'Every day that 
God sends is good.' " Or, when it was a question of ghosts : 
"I remember my poor grandmother, when I said I did not 
believe in ghosts, because I hadn't seen them; she would 
say: 'You don't see them, child, because you're not good 
enough to see them.' " 

His grandparents were Wicklow people, and he had an 
extraordinary love of Wicklow. Nothing pleased him so 
much in his later life as to go driving his pony over the 
mountains to the Seven Churches, where his grandfather 
and grandmother lie buried. Younger people would make 
the expedition following on bicycles, and would come up 
with him sitting on his grandfather's grave, the eternal 
pipe in his mouth, the pony grazing near by, a picture of 
quietness. Cheeverstown came to be entirely his in later 
life, and he would spend hours sitting behind his little pony 

[2] 



MY FATHER 

at the head of a field, smoking and gazing away over the 
browsing cattle to the beautiful mountains. He used to 
live in the past in those moments. He was very strenuous, 
and no doubt he needed his dreams to set against his violent 
activities. "There's no air in the world like the air of 
Cheeverstown," he would say, as he turned the pony about 
regretfully to go home to his house in the valley. 

He had all sorts of memories of the Dublin of his youth. 
One curious link with the past was that he remembered how 
Major Sirr — hated in Ireland as the man who captured and 
mortally wounded Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the bright, the 
beautiful, the immortally young — had patted his curly locks 
as a child. His evidence about Major Sirr was rather in 
the direction of rehabilitating him. He was never one for 
conventional beliefs; and while he yielded to none in his 
love for Lord Edward, he was not the less impartial as re- 
gards him whom many people would have called Lord Ed- 
ward's murderer. 

"When I was a flaxen-haired child," he said, "I used to 
play about the Castle Yard. One day we had been playing 
marbles on the steps of a house, when the door opened, and 
a man whom I took to be a tall man hurriedly came out. 
My companions scattered, but I remained. He took me by 
the chin, and lifting it up looked down into my eyes. 'Well, 
little boy, do you often play marbles on my steps ?' he asked. 
'Very often,' I said fearlessly. 'And hop-scotch, and spin- 
ning tops, and all your other games?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, 
you can go on playing them then, and don't be afraid.' 
After he had gone, the others, running back, cried out : 
'Did you know it was Major Sirr?' I had no idea indeed 
that it was he whose name was something of a bugaboo to 
frighten children in the dark. 

"Hated as he was, however, he had the reputation, as a 

[3] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

magistrate, of being fair and impartial. There was a friend 
of my grandfather's, Edward Byrne, like himself a Wicklow 
man, settled in Dublin. One night he was walking home 
after enjoying an evening with some friends. He was three 
sheets in the wind, and as he was going down George's 
Street he struck up a good old Croppy song — 'Billy Byrne 
of Ballymanus' — in a most loud and stentorian voice. He 
was suddenl}' confronted by a tall man, who walked up to 
him, and, without speaking a word, struck him a blow on 
the side of the face which, Byrne not being very steady, 
knocked him into the gutter. Byrne, who was a very power- 
ful and athletic man, belonging to a very pugilistic family, 
and being own uncle to Simon Byrne, who never met a 
man that he could not beat boxing, leaped to his feet, 
rushed on his assailant with all the force and power in him, 
and knowing he had a foe of both courage and science to 
contend with he rained a shower of terrific blows on him 
which felled him to the ground. 'Get up,' said Byrne, 'I 
strike no man when he is down,' at the same time receding 
some paces. In an instant the man leaped to his feet, but, 
instead of advancing to the fray, he emitted a piercing 
whistle, and in a minute there rushed up ten or twelve of 
the most powerful men of the Dublin Watch. After a pro- 
longed struggle they succeeded in felling Byrne, bound him, 
and carried him off to the old Werburgh Street lock-up or 
watch-house. 

"Now Byrne was well known to the watchmen; and one 
of them summoned my grandfather to stand by his friend 
in his trouble. The next morning the two appeared before 
Major Sirr, in whom Byrne, to his alarm, recognised his 
opponent of last night. 

"The major looked steadfastly at him. 

[4] 



MY FATHER 

" 'Your name is Edward Byrne, I see, but you are not a 
Dublin man.' 

" *No, indeed, sir. I belong to Wicklow.' 

" 'Ha ! so you are one of the Wicklow Byrnes. Mr. 
Byrne, what right had you to be disturbing the peace of 
the citizens of Dublin after midnight, when I was fortunate 
enough to meet with you?' 

" 'No right, sir. I didn't know where I was. I didn't 
know it was Dublin at all. I thought myself back on the 
Wicklow hills.' 

" 'Mr. Byrne, are you as good a man to-day as you were 
last night?' 

" 'I am not, sir. It wasn't me was in it last night : it 
was the drink I had taken.' 

" 'Mr. Byrne, will you promise me that I shall not find 
you brawling in the streets of Dublin again ?' 

" 'Indeed I will, sir.' 

" 'Well, then, you may go with your friend.* 

"Of Major Sirr's personal courage there was no doubt. 
He went the rounds of the city every night alone, though 
there were watchmen within sound of his whistle. Yet he 
knew that three-fourths of the citizens of Dublin would re- 
joice in his death. 

"My grandfather had a case before him once. He had 
bought a horse from one of two brothers, and it having 
been in his possession some days the other brother claimed 
it, saying his brother had no right to dispose of it. He had 
brought a number of his friends with him and, my grand- 
father disputing his claim, they made an attempt to seize 
the horse by force. My grandfather's neighbours rallied 
round him and after a pitched battle he was able to retain 
the horse. He then summoned the man before Major Sirr 
for assault and attempting to seize the horse by force. 

[5] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

" 'How much did you pay for the horse?' the major asked 
my grandfather. 

" 'Twenty pounds, sir.' 

" 'Are you prepared to hand over the twenty pounds and 
take your horse ?' he asked the other. 

'"No, sir.' 

" 'In that case,' said the Major, 'the horse is the property 
of this man who purchased him. All I can do for you is, if 
you bring your brother before me, I will transport him.' " 

He would talk of Fishamble Street Theatre, and I be- 
lieve he had memories of Smock Alley, but I am not sure. 
He said he knew a hundred jig-steps in his young manhood, 
and it is quite possible he did. I can remember him dancing, 
and it was dramatic dancing, the dancing of the Celt and 
the Latin rather than the Teuton. His dancing expressed 
all that could be said of compliment and love-making. 

He will recur constantly in this book of mine. I owe him 
so much and I am so eager to pay my debt, that I should 
not mind being called Katharine the Daughter, but not in 
derision, as a Stuart's daughter was called. I remember 
him as a young, gay, joyous father, before too many cares 
fell upon him. There was a period when I hardly see him. 
He recedes in the picture. He was perhaps somewhat over- 
whelmed by the cares of providing for a big family. Again 
he comes forward, and he and I are the tenderest of com- 
rades and friends. I think he was born out of his due place. 
There is no one in Ireland so unromantic as "the strong 
farmers," to which class he belonged. He had a deal of 
the poet, the dreamer, the imaginative man in him, despite 
his strenuous personality. Doubtless his fellows smiled at 
his novelties in farming. He adored his land with a pas- 
sion. I believe he was glad to take up scientific farming, 
so that he might spill money into it like water. His pas- 

[6] 



MY FATHER 

sion wanted the land to be more rich, more beautiful, more 
fruitful than any one else's land. He made it that — spill- 
ing gold into it. In the days of my girlhood there was 
grass to your knees on that land. I believe it was over- 
rich for the cattle. I am sure the gold spilt into it did not 
fetch a ten pound note more for the land when it was sold 
to the Government to be split up into farms for evicted 
tenants, though doubtless it lightened the labours of the 
evicted. His neighbour with the thistly land across the 
road probably fared better. The land took the gold and 
kept it. 

Yet who shall say he did not get money's worth out of 
his joy in it, and more than money's worth ? 

There are some people who when they die leave a gap 
in the world, even for those who have only seen them at 
a distance. When he died a whole countryside felt it so. 
Something had gone from the green glens and the purple 
mountainsides, from the long, sweet, winding roads where 
one might never again hear the feet of his little pony trot- 
ting and see him coming along with his kind old rosy face 
and his eyes bluer than a child's. People said : "There is 
no one like him left. The country is not the same without 
him. He was part of the country." And it was so. He 
had become a part of the country. He was one of the im- 
mortals whose place in the serried ranks of the ages of 
men will never be filled by another made quite after his 
likeness. 

He was of so dominant and energetic a character that the 
weakness of old age in him had a poignant sense of pain 
for one who remembered his prime. In the readjustment 
of things that is always happening day by day for our dead, 
the memory of him as a quiet old man in the chimney- 
corner, dreading the sound of a rough word, becomes dim- 

[7] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

mer and dimmer. Already one remembers him only in his 
prime. He was an oak of the forest : and rightly one thinks 
of him in his strength that stood, a four-square battlement, 
to all the winds of heaven. 

If one were asked straight off, without thinking, to name 
his strongest characteristic, one would say, I think, his fear- 
lessness. He feared nothing. Under his wholesome health 
he had nerves and imagination not known among his fel- 
lows; but his nerves had nothing to do with nervousness. 
I have driven with him in a thunderstorm along miles of 
tree-hung roads when the blue lightning leaped in chains 
within a foot of us and his voice talking to and soothing 
his pony kept the little creature from wild panic as his abso- 
lute courage put courage into my quaking heart. With him 
it was impossible to be afraid. 

He had his stories of Cheeverstown, of those fields the 
very names of which — "Larry's Field," "The Cuckoo's 
Field," and so on — had magic for him. There was a little, 
ancient castle or watch-tower of the early Irish somewhere 
midway of those dream-haunted fields, which had its rath, 
its ghosts and fairies. Under the shadow of the tower 
was a thatched cabin of two rooms. He was so fearless that 
any story of the supernatural coming from him had a curi- 
ous impressiveness. Once, as a boy, having been up from 
daydawn with his grandfather's men when they went out 
milking, he fell asleep on a heap of straw in the inner room. 
In the outer they were playing cards by the light of a tallow 
candle. He could make you see it all, as he saw it through 
the doorless aperture between the two rooms. He could 
make you see and smell the night outside, the dews, the 
white moon of May, and the intoxicating airs of the haw- 
thorn (as they call it in Ireland). Within, the rough heads 
bent over the filthy cards, the dirty walls of the cabin, 

[8] 



MY FATHER 

furnitureless but for the table and a few makeshift seats, 
the black thatch showing through the rafters, the shadows 
of the players' heads on the wall, their clutching fingers and 
bowed shoulders. He had the literary sense to make you 
realize all those things. 

Suddenly he was awakened from his sleep by the loud 
voices of the players. One, ill-famed for the foulness of 
his speech, was in bad luck, and uttering blasphemy after 
blasphemy, growing worse as his anger increased. Even 
his rough companions murmured and shrank away from 
him, and the lad, lying on the straw, felt appalled. There 
was a viler blasphemy than any that had preceded it, and 
suddenly a great wind forced open the door of the cabin, 
flung the players on their faces, threw over the table and 
the light, and drove through the place, dying away as sud- 
denly as it had come and leaving the undisturbed beauty 
of the night as it had been. 

Of his fearlessness I must tell one or two stories. 

He had a friend who suddenly developed a homicidal or 
suicidal mania. Word came to him that the man had es- 
caped to a loft above his stables, where, naked as the hour 
he was born, he held at bay those who would seize him, 
for he was armed with a razor. 

My father never hesitated for a second. The entrance 
to the loft was by a square aperture above the heads of the 
horses in the stable. One had to climb by the manger and 
the rack and to pull one's self up to the floor above. That 
ascent into the loft, occupied by the naked madman with 
the razor, was, I think, a feat few would have cared for : 
the person ascending was so absolutely defenceless. 

But he so fearless was he that he was not conscious 

of any bravery in the act ! He simply could not be afraid. 



[9] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

He heaved himself into the loft as though it held nothing 
but the hay. 

"Isn't it a shame for you, John," he said, "to be sitting 
there without your clothes? Here, I've brought them to 
you. Put them on for goodness' sake, and then we can 
talk." 

He sat down on "a lock of hay," as he would have called 
it himself, and proceeded to empty his pipe of the ashes and 
fill it again. I can see him so well with the empty pipe on his 
knee while he mixed the tobacco in the palm of his hand and 
talked in an even flow as soothing as the fall of waters. 
Meanwhile the naked madman in the corner had begun to 
clothe himself. 

"Surely to goodness, John," went on the quiet voice, "you 
wouldn't be hurting yourself or anyone else with that razor. 
What on earth are you doing with it open like that ? Why, 
you might cut yourself, so you might. If it was shaving you 
wanted, the barber would do it for you. Put it down, man, 
before you cut yourself with it." 

The madman put down the razor quietly and allowed his 
friend to take possession of it. More, when he was clad he 
allowed himself to be driven to the big lunatic asylum by the 
man he trusted. That was a part of the adventure which 
hurt him. 

"I shall never forget," he used to say, "poor John's face as 
he looked out from between the big keepers. 'If I'd known 
you'd have done the like on me,' he said, 'I'd have cut your 
throat with the razor.' Poor John, sure it had to be, for 
his good." 

Another time it was a wicked cow, which had nearly 
killed a man. She was loose in a field and no one would 
approach her. They were talking of shooting her. Any- 
thing that he did not know about cattle was not worth know- 

[lo] 



MY FATHER 

ing. He walked into the field, despite the efforts of those 
who would restrain him. The cow came at him, her head 
down to charge. He waited, and at the moment of the 
charge he received her with a kick in the nose. She lifted 
her head and looked at him in amazement: then trotted 
quietly away and began grazing. He kept her for a con- 
siderable time after that and she was quite harmless. Oddly 
enough, too, she evinced a particular affection for him. 
"She'd let me handle her calf when no one else dare go 
near her," he said. It would have been a serious matter 
for him if he had missed that kick, for she had been an ill 
beast from the hour of her calving, and her latest victim 
was only one of a long line. He was not young then, and 
he had ceased to be agile. We used to reproach him, say- 
ing: "What would have happened if you had missed?" 
"I didn't miss," he would answer, "and I knew I wasn't 
going to miss. And look at her now. A kinder cow you 
wouldn't meet with in a day's walk." 

Another time it was a dangerous bull, delivered to him 
in a frenzied state by a pack of yokels, half of them hang- 
ing on by ropes fastened to the ring in the bull's nose and 
to his horns, the other half belabouring the poor splendid 
beast with blackthorns. He swept them away with one of 
his tempestuous bursts of anger; and they scattered like 
chaff before the wind when they discovered that his pur- 
pose was to set the bull free. "Hold on to him ! Hold on 
to him!" they kept shouting from a safe distance. He 
opened the gate of a field where a herd of young cows was 
grazing and turned the bull in. There was no further 
trouble with the bull after that. 

I have known him to drive through a field of his own into 
which a neighbours wicked bull had escaped, to cross the 
field with the brute roaring and pawing the ground in most 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

unpleasant proximity to himself and his pony, he flicking 
his whip gently about the bull's head as he went. Arrived 
at the gate through which he must pass to enter the next 
field, he clambered out of the pony-cart, opened the gate, 
and led the pony through, closing the gate behind him in 
the face of the astonished bull. 

His fearlessness occasionally led him to do things alarm- 
ing to his neighbours. Once he bought and sent home thirty 
Spanish bulls. The panic of the men who went to the boat 
to receive the cattle and were met by the wilderness of 
wide tossing horns, and the terror of the quiet country 
through which they were driven, may be imagined. After 
all, they proved to be gentle beasts and no evil results 
followed. 

Animals always loved him despite his tempestuousness. 
In anger he was tempestuous, splendid, like the storm-wind. 
I can remember a big Irish kitchen with an enormous rosy 
fire that sent its glow far out into the night. A "half- 
door" gave entrance from the farm-yard into the kitchen. 
Before the fire would be basking half-a-dozen dogs in per- 
fect content. Presently, in the yard outside, would be heard 
a tumult. Something had happened : a man come home 
drunk in charge of a horse and cart, cattle overdriven — 
some such malfeasance or neglect of duty. The master's 
voice would be heard in a mighty shouting; and the dogs, 
getting stealthily to their feet, would steal one by one into 
the shelter of a huge kitchen-table, below which they would 
lie with their noses on their paws, sighing because the master 
was angry and someone in trouble. 

The odd thing was that no one resented those violent 
outbursts; not even those who had had a violent handling, 
well earned, from him. His men were to a man devoted 
to him. Women always loved him; and an insolent do- 

[12] 



MY FATHER 

mestic, whom he had discovered browbeating his young 
daughters and turned out, declared always that it was the 
aforesaid young daughters, who trembled before the 
termagant, that were to blame and not he. 

He had in a most extraordinary way the spirit of the 
country. He was a wonderful talker, and as you sat listen- 
ing to him by the fire he made live again for you the days 
that were over. Always he was filling his pipe or smoking 
it, interrupting the narrative to ask for a straw — he called 
it a thraneeti — to clean the stem of it, or a match to light 
it, or it might be a wad of soft paper to put in the bowl of 
it, to absorb the nicotine. He was an intemperate smoker; 
the only one I have ever known who kept pipe and tobacco 
by his bedside and woke up at intervals during the night 
to smoke. He smoked very strong tobacco, enough to make 
the head of a younger man reel. He used to amuse him- 
self by calculations as to how much richer a man he would 
have been if he had not been a smoker. As it was, his 
splendid personality, his abounding health, the clear rose 
of his cheek, the unsullied blue of his eye, were a counter- 
blast to the haters of tobacco. 

He loved to talk of the Ireland which was out of our 
memories, the Ireland of the dances at the cross-roads, and 
all the old customs, when he was young, before the Famine 
brought the death into the hearts of the people and the 
emigrant-ships had carried them away. He had much to 
tell. Reconstructing the old life in the Glens of Wicklow, 
he would tell the history of this one or that one, branching 
off from the main narrative to tell what befell the other 
characters in the story — "like a Saga," said an Oxford pro- 
fessor who listened to him, entranced, for the length of 
a day, and would have gone on listening for many days 
if he might. 

[13] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I pick up a book published in the late eighties by an 
American who visited Ireland and sifted patiently all the 
evidence that came before him from men of opposite creeds 
and classes and politics and points of view regarding the 
Irish question. The American took down what he heard 
verbatim. Here is a bit which recalls the days that are 
no more, in which my father's utterances have the Saga-like 
quality noted by the Oxford professor. "A massive man," 
the American describes him, ''dressed in thick blue serge 
made of the wool of his own sheep, with a magnificent 
Landor-like forehead towering over a face that was one 
large smile." I can see him and hear him as he talks, driv- 
ing his guest through the mountainous country, flicking 
his pony gently with the whip as he talked. 

"We took a delightful drive," wrote the American, who 
was a gentleman, a scholar and a man of literary taste and 
performance — an American indeed who bore the name of 
an English noble house and called cousins with a dozen 
English families of the aristocracy. "We took a delightful 
drive through the valley and back among the Wicklow hills. 
Here and there the lofty walls of some gentleman's demesne 
cut off the view : again we clattered along the ill-paved 
streets of a little village; and near every village were the 
ruins of deserted mills and melancholy rows of cottages with 
broken window-panes of long-forgotten mill-hands. 'There 
were fourteen or fifteen paper-mills here in my boyhood,' 
he murmured : 'now they are all obliterated, simply because 
the great thinkers of the Empire decided that there should 
be no tax on knowledge, and so newspapers were sold for 
a penny instead of sixpence. All this looks well, but it 
doesn't work. There were even up to three years ago ten or 
twelve flour-mills at work in this neighbourhood. They 
are all gone, ruined by American competition.' In the good 

[14] 




Andrew Tynan 



MY FATHER 

old times things were very different." I forgot the jolting of 
the car as he slowly recalled the past and some of its be- 
loved figures. " 'My great-grandfather Cullen was a farmer 
with plenty of land. He supplemented his farm-work by 
dealing in timber. He would buy twenty or thirty acres 
of oakwood, strip the bark, dry it, and sell it in Dublin. 
Of the timber he would select what was good enough for 
ship-building, and the debris he made into charcoal. He 
had two sons and five daughters. He and his two sons 
were weavers and all his daughters carders, and the family 
wove and carded the wool of their own sheep and sold the 
flannel, and dressed themselves in it: coats, jackets, and 
trousers were all home-made. They had plenty of money 
to spare for everything. Now there is not a weaver in the 
County of Wicklow. My great-grandfather Kelly was also 
a farmer in Wicklow with a hundred acres, but he was a 
hatter besides and kept fifty men at work supplying hat- 
frames for the English army. I remember him well, and 
he remembered when the O'Tooles held Wicklow.' " 

There was hardly a Sunday of the years when I was a 
girl, those good years of perfect companionship, when he 
did not drive off after breakfast to pick up a couple of visit- 
ing English or Americans or Colonials at the light railway 
station, and to take them a drive through the country be- 
fore bringing them home. He was always ready to enter- 
tain those visitors in the first place to his writing daughter. 
He had such a wonderful interest in things and people. 
Sometimes he had no clue and she had no clue as to what 
the visitors might look like. He was always ready to dis- 
cover them and receive them in a way that filled them with 
pleasure. He would pay an innocent, audacious compli- 
ment to a woman w^hich was irresistible. Once he met an 
American mother and daughter. 

[15] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

"My daughter told me," he said, "to look out for two 
ladies who were mother and daughter. She did not tell 
me that I should find two so young and so pretty that they 
might pass for twin sisters." 

He delighted all manner of men, but still more all man- 
ner of women. Being of that dominant nature that he would 
sometimes roar down a man in argument, he was invariably 
gentle with women, and he had peculiarly the gift of pleas- 
ing them. 

Once or twice in these later years he went travelling — 
twice to America, and to London and Paris. He used to 
make many friends on these expeditions, priests, parsons, 
professional men, sometimes a young army man, or a sprig 
of the aristocracy. He seldom or never foregathered with 
men of his own business, nor indeed business men at all. 
The scholar, the artist, the politician, men of higher affairs, 
delighted in him. He used to come home with tales of 
the conquests he had made and the friends he had taken 
by storm — delightful, innocent, witty tales. Once he was 
the darling of the ladies on a Transatlantic voyage, because 
of a slightly broad repartee made to a millionaire who was 
less simple than millionaires usually are. It was a very 
innocent repartee, but it was told with slight shyness. He 
had to tell it for the sympathy, yet he was oddly, unexpect- 
edly prim with a daughter. "The ladies," he said, "used to 
whisper to each other and laugh as I went by, and they 
were kinder than ever. As for him he kept to his state- 
room for the rest of the voyage." 

I have spoken of his fearlessness. Side by side with it 
was his disregard of rank and dignities, real or imaginary, 
if he ran his head up against them. His attitude towards 
the great or the pseudo-great happily escaped snobbishness 
on the one hand, ill-manners on the other. He had beauti- 

[i6] 



MY FATHER 

fill manners when good-manners were required. He had 
the feeHng for rank and title — the pageantry of Hfe — which 
all imaginative people — at least among the Irish Celts — 
have. He liked to tell of the civility shown him by a Duke 
when he gave evidence before a Royal Commission. On 
the other hand, he stopped the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland 
when he would have crossed his lands following the hounds. 
I remember how he used to tell the story. It was Earl 
Spencer in the days of his good Viceroyalty, long before 
the sad days when he was Foxy Jack and rode through 
the streets of Dublin in the midst of an armed escort. My 
father would tell how he found a couple of horsemen en- 
deavouring to knock the padlock off a gate. In the field 
were a score or two of sheep and it was the lambing season. 
His rages were fine to see. He hurled himself upon the 
horsemen in a towering passion. I can vouch for it that 
he had the gift of language. 

"The tall gentleman with the red beard," he said, "never 
spoke a word, but the young one asked me if I knew that 
it was the Lord-Lieutenant I was speaking to. I said that 
I didn't care if it was the King : he should not cross my land 
in the lambing season, with a pack of dashed hounds yelping 
and screaming among the sheep, and a lot of idlers and 
wastrels following them. I don't know what else I might 
have said, if the Lord-Lieutenant himself hadn't spoken. 
He said : 'Sir, I very much regret the thoughtlessness of 
the act I was about to perform.' " My father always repro- 
duced a conversation with a certain old-fashioned stiltedness. 
" 'I have only to assure you, sir, that I would not have done 
so if I had been aware of the harm to your flock that might 
ensue. If you will kindly allow us to ride very quietly down 
by the headland, so as to reach the road, I shall be extremely 
obliged.' His courtesy completely took the wind out 

[17] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

of my sails," my father would add humorously. "I not 
only allowed him and the other gentlemen to ride down the 
headland, but I went with them to show them the way across 
country by which they could come up with the pack. His 
Excellency thanked me very courteously as he rode away." 

Being cap in hand to no man he yet regretted the decline 
of manners which followed the Land League. He used to 
comment humorously on his discovery that where he was 
called "Tynan" or "Ould Andy" by his men in hours of 
ease, they had taken to referring to each other as Mr. So- 
and-So. I can see him now of a grey winter afternoon 
where he sat down on a wayside heap of stones to light his 
pipe — he would sit down in Piccadilly to do the same if 
it suited him — looking up at me with an eye half humorous 
while he told me how he had asked the road-mender about 

certain figures seen against the sky-line. "It's L 

and his woman," the road-mender had replied. "I seen 

them going by a while ago." L was a young baronet 

of an historic name, and his wife was a charming, brown- 
faced girl in whose veins ran some of the proudest blood 

in England. " *L and his woman,' to be sure," my 

father repeated half ruefully. "I think the penny that used 
to be paid for manners has got other uses." 

Once, I remember, he entertained three public men who 
had a greater sense of their own dignity than he altogether 
approved. It was a raw winter Sunday and they were 
enjoying themselves by a roaring fire with pipes and glasses, 
telling fine stories of their doings in those days of the Union 
of Hearts. Some imp of malice stirred In his breast. He 
discovered that the fireside was no place on a fine cold 
winter day. He invited them to a tramp over the fields 
and they agreed unwillingly. It was a long tramp from 
which they returned muddy, with stains of travel on their 

[i8] 



MY FATHER 

broadcloth and their top hats dishevelled. Hardly were 
they in when my father arrived with a rush. "Did you 
ever see medicine administered to a sick cow, gentlemen?" 
he asked. "If not, come and see me do it. You may find 
it useful some time or other." The poor politicians followed 
him sadly. They not only saw the medicine administered, 
but they had to assist in its administration. I draw a veil 
over the picture. My father admitted afterwards that he 
had not been altogether kind, but apparently he had enjoyed 
his joke very much. 

Any picture of him which did not present his broad and 
humane humour must be incomplete. Seven years after his 
death I feel able to laugh as we laughed long ago. I doubt 
that he was ever popular with his own class. With the 
people and with a higher social class he was very much 
beloved and admired. The peasants, servants, tramping 
people, beggars, and the like, had an appreciation of him 
as he had of them. They never resented it when he was 
violent with them. 

Once it was a brawny beggar to whom he offered a 
shilling if he would take a fork and clean out an outhouse. 
The beggar spat reflectively, not to say contemptuously, 

"Look here, my man," said he. "Do you see that city 
over there in the smoke? Well, that city has, I suppose, 
at laste a hundred streets in it, an' every street has at laste 
fifty houses to it. Now, every wan o' them streets is worth 
at laste tuppence to me, maybe more. Now, why would I 
be afther spendin' my time doing your dirty work for a 
shillin'. To — wid your shillin'." 

My father was subject to sudden bursts of temper. On 
this occasion he was too amused to be angry. 

"The philosophy of the fellow so took me," he said, "that 

[19] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I gave him a couple of coppers to start him on the road 
to DubHn." 

He was equally amused when a man who had been in his 
employment, a wild, gipsy-like fellow, was prosecuted for 
annoying people still in tlie employment. He was fined five 
shillings ; and since he had not five farthings, he looked help- 
lessly round the court. "Bedad, I don't know who'll pay it 
for me," he said, "unless, maybe, Mr. Tynan might." And 
he did. 

The same fellow was prosecuted over and over. The wife 
of a ploughman in my father's employment said that 
Shepherd's language was so "laborious" that she could not 
sleep at night, afraid the roof would fall in on him : he was 
her next-door neighbour. Shortly after one of these prose- 
cutions I, being purblind, became suddenly aware on a long 
straight road without habitations, of Shepherd coming along 
roaring drunk, his old mother behind him waving her arms 
like the sails of a mill in anguished entreaty to me to dis- 
appear. I stood rooted to the ground, paralysed. I really 
thought my last hour had come. The old mother dropped 
on her knees in the road, as Shepherd became aware of 
me and made a rush like an unsteady bull in my direction. 
But instead of the annihilation I expected, he simply laid 
his head on my shoulder and wept. "Your father's after 
destroyin' me, Miss," he said, "for the sake of them that's 
good nayther for God nor the Divil. And, oh, how I loved 
that man !" I consoled him as best I could, being in a great 
hurry to depart, and left amid a shower of blessings with 
hands mangled in a grim.y grasp. 

I had an almost equally dangerous adventure with Joe 
Geraghty the tinker. When Geraghty was drunk everybody 
went into their houses and barricaded themselves within. 
Fortunately he gave warning of his coming from a long way 

[20] 



MY FATHER 

off, for he shouted like a bull of Bashan. I had, in his 
more sober moments, urged him to take the pledge, and he 
had promised me ironically to abstain from strong liquors 
between the drink he "was afther havin' and the next drink 
he met with," 

Again I walked into the enemy's arms, and discovered 
that Geraghty was armed with the formidable tool known 
as "a graipe" in Ireland, and was evidently out for murder. 
Becoming aware of me, he laid down the "graipe" very 
gently and began spitting on his hands and polishing them 
on his corduroys. I quaked, not knowing what this might 
portend, and stared helplessly in Joe Geraghty' s face. "Lay 
it there," he said in a tone of great tenderness, extending 
his grimy tinker's palm for my hand, "Lay it there. 
You've got the best man in the country for your father." 

Once it was an impudent pair of tramps who, having told 
a tale of starvation, refused to eat the good bread and meat 
he himself had cut for them. He did not say much, but 
he took up a fork that lay "handy" — as they say in Ireland 
when they don't say "adjacent." A couple of visitors met 
the tramps fleeing, too terrified to realise that his pursuit 
had ceased. "That's a terrible man up there," they said. 
"It was be the blessin' of God we got off with our lives." 

Another time, when he was absent at a fair and the men 
all away at the harvest, the women In the house were terrified 
by a huge red-headed tramp, who took the wag-by-the-wall 
clock, which had not gone for years, down from its place, 
and insisted on setting it in order as he called it. Having 
manipulated the clock he demanded thirteen-and-six for re- 
pairs, reducing his demands by slow degrees until they had 
arrived at sixpence. For some reason or other, no one in 
the house had any money, else, I believe, we would have 
paid him any money to get rid of him. At last we hit on 

[21] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the happy idea of asking him to call at a later hour, when 
we expected that my father would have returned. 

By the time he came back my father was home and had 
heard the tale. He was making up his accounts in the 
parlour of the farm-house, painfully. He was never much 
of a penman. He was not a big man, although he was 
broadly built ; and the tramp was a son of Anak. Suddenly 
the parlour door opened, and instead of a trembling woman, 
my father hurled himself forth on the big tramp, who was 
standing menacingly in the kitchen, the door of which 
opened on to the farmyard. "Are you the ruffian that has 
been terrorising my little girls?" shouted my father, in 
a most Jove-like rage. The tramp turned and fled, and we 
never saw him again. 

I used to remonstrate with him on those gusty tempers, 
especially after a doctor had diagnosed some weakness of the 
heart. He would reply with an argument on the beneficial 
effects on the heart, liver, brain, and digestion of a man, of 
a good, honest fit of rage, illustrating it by a tale of how 
he was roused out of a lethargy which threatened his health 
and reason, after the death of a favourite child, by the rage 
he got into when some member of a snowballing crowd 
struck him with a snowball in which a stone was concealed. 
He could not endure any hitting below the belt. He was 
shaking the youth who had flung the missile as a terrier 
shakes a rat, when a policeman rescued him. "After that," 
he would say, telling the tale, "I was my own man." 

Oddly enough, his violence never got him into any trouble. 
No one ever bore him malice. I remember how annoyed he 
was when, as defendant in some litigation, he expressed him- 
self freely concerning the plaintiff before he could be 
stopped — and one of the Judges, peering at him over his 
glasses, remarked gently: 'Tm afraid you are a rather 

[22] 



MY FATHER 

hasty-tempered man, Mr. Tynan," He used to ask us and 
others if they had ever heard a more uncalled-for remark. 
In his latter days he expressed a wish to be buried in the 
little churchyard at Tallaght, just behind the village street. 
"I'd like to think," he said, "that the beggars passing by 
would come in and say, *God rest you, Andy !' " Years 
afterwards I heard someone say that there was nearly always 
a beggar praying by his grave. 



[23] 



CHAPTER II 

MISTS AND SHADOWS 

Out of the dim mists and shadows of early childhood there 
stand out clearly certain memories. One is pertinent to this 
time and the future, for it is a memory of hearing Irish 
peasant servants talk in horror of certain riots in Belfast 
in which the women's ear-rings were pulled through the 
lobes of their ears. Let the historian of Belfast rioting say 
what year that was. It would have been some time in the 
late sixties : and I have an idea that there were some bad 
riots in connection with the Disestablishment of the Irish 
Church. If my idea has a foundation in fact, that would 
fix the date as about 1868. Another memory is of the 
wonderful aurora which was seen in the summer before the 
Franco-Prussian war. I was carried out wrapped up in 
shawls to see the great flames shooting up the sky. There 
was certainly talk then of armies seen fighting in the sky: 
and the blood-red aurora had its omens and portents well 
fulfilled in Metz and Saarbriick, Gravelotte and Sedan. 

I have another odd association with Imperial Paris of that 
day. My very earliest school was run by a spinster lady 
named Miss M'Cabe. She occupied a floor — the topmost 
floor of one of those toppling Dublin houses which are a 
survival of the English occupation. This house — it would 
be Queen Anne, I think — was at the end of a long garden. 
In course of time shops had sprung up in front of it, and 
it was approached only by means of a long, flagged, 
covered-in passage. The house stood up, dark and dream- 
ing, at the end of the garden, which had long lost its garden- 
beds and possessed only a few stunted lilacs and a sycamore. 

[24] 



MISTS AND SHADOWS 

I spoke of the English occupation, but, after all, there was 
something foreign about it — like old Paris rather than old 
London. There was a curious devil of a knocker on the 
blistered hall door, which impressed my babyish imagination. 
The house had its ancient dignity, its air of being "reduced/' 
as they say in Ireland. You looked from its upper windows 
on to another house of the same size and build — its twin 
in fact — and you saw that it was caught into a roaring slum. 
Washing hung on poles from its windows, the broken panes 
of which were stuffed with rags. Its garden was a huge 
mud or dust pie, with innumerable ragged children indus- 
triously rooting in it. Slatterns shouted from the windows 
to slatterns below, or lounged in the doorway under the 
beautiful fan-light set in the elaborate screens common to 
old Dublin houses, which were built with a lavish disregard 
of economy. 

Both houses were probably at one time country-houses, 
for they were in the outskirts of Dublin. The brass grates 
survived in Miss M'Cabe's apartments. I suppose all has 
long since passed to the limbo of forgotten things, but I 
have never taken the trouble to see for myself. The Dublin 
of my childhood was full of such quaint nooks and corners : 
and a good many of them doubtless still survive, for Dub- 
lin does not change. There is a restfulness coming back to 
it, in finding how little it has changed. That is one reason 
why it is so beautiful, why it carries its Imperial air so 
nobly — beautiful and venerable. There are worlds and 
time enough in Dublin to live and love. Life is not for ever 
shifting beneath your feet, slipping through your fingers 
like the sands of the hour-glass, as it is in busy centres. 
That is why Dublin is good "to make your soul" in. She 
has time for the eternities. 

But to my link with the Imperial Court. Miss M'Cabe 

[25] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

had a sister who was employed in some capacity, EngHsh 
nurse, EngUsh governess — something or other at the brilliant 
Court of the Second Empire. She was the purple patch 
in Miss M'Cabe's life, and a fairy to the child with whom 
fairies were too much a matter of every day to make a fuss 
over. I think she must have been a governess — a person of 
consideration certainly : for her finery^ discarded rapidly, 
travelled over to her sister. Perhaps the situation is more 
explicable in the light of Miss M'Cabe and her sister being — 
'verts if you will — to the Catholic faith. She had suffered 
for conscience' sake, being cast out by an uncompromising 
Irish Protestant family. Years later, when I visited a Dub- 
lin home for old ladies ruined by the Land League, I saw 
duplicates of Miss M'Cabe around me on every side. 

I was so very small at this time, that I remember an 
occasion I wa^ allowed to put on my own coat to go home, 
putting it on back to front, and making the very tiny journey 
that was between school and home in tears, because of the 
derision of the street-boys, who hailed me as "Paddy from 
Cork with his coat buttoned behind him." 

A piquant connection it was between the French Imperial 

Court and i yA Street. Little as I was — I could hardly 

have been more than five — I must have been at least a con- 
temporary in mental age of Miss M'Cabe; for although I 
used to tumble off to sleep from my stool and be put to bed 
in Miss M'Cabe's own bed and be regaled when I woke up 
with buttered toast and tea, I was the one to be taken into 
counsel when it was a question of what Miss M'Cabe should 
wear at a picnic — a rare event in her drab life, I should 
think. But perhaps, after all, she was not so very old. Five- 
years-old is apt to be hazy about the ages of its elders. It 
is quite possible that the lady whom I think of now as a 

[26] 



MISTS AND SHADOWS 

spinster in the 'fifties may have been twenty years younger 
and quite a suitable person for a picnic. 

I was taken into counsel, and Miss M'Cabe's bed-sitting- 
room, with the brass grate, where the kettle boiled always 
on a brass tripod ready for the joyful cup of tea, was littered 
with finery very much out of its due place. Out of it all there 
remain with me three dresses — a pink silk covered with 
black lace, a blue silk covered with white lace, and the one 
which I had the discretion to select for Miss M'Cabe in 
view of her enormous age. That was a black and white 
silk, a hair-stripe as they called it then, trimmed with black 
lace. A black lace shawl was to be worn with it, and there 
was an elegant sunshade with a handle which folded in the 
middle. The hat or bonnet I have forgotten, as well as the 
petticoats. I assisted in the choice of all — and I believe that 
Miss M'Cabe was rather grieved at my choice of the hair- 
stripe, and fingered the blue silk and the pink silk lingeringly. 
Perhaps she wore one of them instead of my sober choice 
for her. I was not there to see. But as a result of my early 
introduction to Parisian dresses, I had an ideal all through 
my childhood of a pink silk covered with black lace and a 
blue silk covered with white lace, and clad all the heroines 
of whom I read in them ; while to the present day I have an 
extreme partiality for the thought of a hair-stripe black and 
white silk with a black lace fichu caught by a rose. 

I suppose I must have been sent to Miss M'Cabe's to keep 
me out of the way — for baby succeeded baby rapidly in the 
home of my childhood till we were eleven living — and not to 
study chiffons. But I must have been a promising pupil as 
well as dear to my mistress, for I had a faculty for spelling 
arrived at by my early reading, and she used to delight in 
placing me at the foot of a class and seeing me steadily 
mount to the head. 

[27] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

A quaint school and school-marm. The seats and desks 
were so rickety that a kick from an ungovernable infant 
would send the whole edifice tumbling down with the pupils 
buried beneath the ruins. I believe we were only taught 
spelling — and needlework of a sort. We acquired the art 
of hemming by having the hem cut off our garments, after 
which we made a new hem. This theory of teaching did 
not commend itself to mothers and nurses, who saw our 
garments shortening day by day. 

Mists and shadows. Out of them emerges a little girl 
wearing a hoop — myself. I remember dropping it one day 
in the street, stepping out of it and carrying it home in my 
hand. This is not to be remembered against me as a proof 
of my antiquity. All little girls outside babyhood wore 
hoops in those days. I remember a game of hide-and-seek 
with very small children. There was someone fair and 
gracious and laughing — somebody's young aunt or elder 
sister — under whose enormous hoops we hid. I remember 
a discussion on the inconvenience of hoops in a crowd, which 
was certainly not meant for my ears. Also I remember 
quite well the dreadful flatness of the first appearance with- 
out hoops. The lady looked as though she had sustained 
the peine forte et dure of the barbarous Middle Ages. 

There are high lights in the mists and shadows, and all 
between is lost. I was brought up on the dreadful 
churchyard stories of the Irish peasant imagination. We 
used to creep up the dark stairs to bed in a shivering string, 
each child trying to be in the middle and not first or last. 
Of course, I was taken to a wake. I saw more dead people 
in my childhood than ever I saw in youth or maturity. The 
nurse took us to a wake right at the top of one of those old 
Dublin houses such as I have tried to describe. I can recall 
even now the yellow sharpened face of the dead man. There 

[28] 



MISTS AND SHADOWS 

was a plate of salt on his breast, pennies on his eyelids to 
keep them closed, pipes, tobacco, and snuff on a table at the 
bed's foot. 

I suppose there must have been wake-games going on, 
although it was daylight; for the nurse, a wild, harum- 
scarum girl, who played many pranks on her nurselings, 
must have played a prank then, for the memor}^ closes in 
a wild flight down many stairs, two small children gripped 
fast by the nurse being carried down helter-skelter without 
any reference to solid steps — a sort of flight in mid-air it 
seemed — till we were back in the friendly street. 

Again, where there was no levity — we were brought to 
wakes by our nurses, and led to kiss the dead. I have a 
vivid memory of one such experience in an upstairs room of 
an old house in the country — the warm quietness of the 
summer day outside, the candle-light yellow against the 
white-washed walls, the tiny figure in the bed, an old man 
praying at the bed-foot, beating his breast and groaning 
out his Paters and Aves — and myself being lifted up to 
kiss the clay-cold cheek. 

It did not tend to a freedom from nerves. Most girl- 
children at all events, with these experiences, suffered from 
nerves and a terror of death in later life, even after they had 
passed the terrors of childhood which are beyond telling. 

Among my gruesome experiences I recall seeing the drop 
at Kilmainham Jail, a door high in the wall which belonged 
to the days of public executions. It must have been in the 
days of Fenianism, for my elders talked about it with a 
kind of intimate horror. Also I remember a lane, not far 
from my home, looking down which one could see a stable- 
like building which was the morgue of a hospital. That 
building coloured unpleasantly some of my childish dreams, 
especially as I heard the servants tell how the nurses of that 

[29] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

hospital — it must have been the dark ages indeed — left the 
sick and dying to the mercy of some dissolute ruffian, while 
they took their nights off. It was a peculiarly dreadful hos- 
pital, for its sick people were mainly suffering from delirium 
tremens; but that, of course, was knowledge of my later 
years. One of the ruffians happened to be in my father's 
employment. Oddly enough, I remember his name. It was 
Jack Reid. His dissoluteness, I imagine, was mainly drunk- 
enness. But he was hardly one to soothe a dying pillow, 
though I daresay he was equal to handling efficiently, if 
not gently, an insane patient. 

We had not travelled so far in those day* from the 
brutalities of the eighteenth century. Being a little pitcher, 
I had hints and glimpses in the conversation of my elders 
of cruelties out of sight. I remember to have heard my 
father say that the warders of the mad-houses were selected 
because of a certain hard coarseness of fibre which enabled 
them to bear a strain that would have broken down any- 
thing finer. The patients did not seem to be considered in 
the matter. My father added that most of the warders in 
the lunatic asylums died mad. 

One of the people who move through the mists and 
shadows is a prison-matron : tall, vigorous, almost brawny, 
with a handsome, highly-coloured face, made expressionless 
to conceal the fires of temper and other things that raged 
underneath. I believe she was an excellent matron, very 
highly esteemed in the service, and an image of black-silk- 
clad dignity. For eleven months of the year she was un- 
impeachable. The twelfth month being her holiday, having 
made all her arrangements, she disappeared decorously, 
drank herself nearly mad for three weeks, at the end of the 
third week began a drastic course of medicine which was 
to restore her to her right mind, and was ready to return 

[30] 



MISTS AND SHADOWS 

to the post of duty at the appointed time, wan and worn 
but clear-eyed, for another eleven strenuous months. 

An odd thing for a small child to be aware of. But, when 
the small child, in a house steadily growing fuller and fuller 
of children, was prepared to give no trouble at all if she 
was left with a book; and if the small child, escaping from 
other small children who would interrupt her reading, se- 
lected for her studious hours the floor behind the window- 
curtains, or the floor under the round centre-table with a 
long table-cloth falling over and making an ideal place of 
concealment, that small child is apt to overhear what her 
elders say. Great was my silent indignation when, in the 
midst of some conversation, I was discovered and packed 
upstairs. I thought I heard nothing, being so absorbed in 
my story-book — but I must have heard. 

I have been touching on rather gloomy topics : but there 
were lovely times too. When one was not in one's secret 
reading-place there was the space under the sideboard, where 
a child could sit quite in the open, yet not in the way of the 
elders. There were two beautiful large pink-lipped shells 
with which you could spend hours — it might have been only 
minutes — listening to the roar of the sea inside. I re- 
member retiring to the shells on a day the evening of which 
was to take us to the pantomime. I knew that if I jumped 
up and down outside I should be banished, and I had to do 
some jumping, so I jumped quietly under the sideboard, 
very carefully lest I should strike my head, and then I sat 
down with a shell to my ears and kept quiet. 

The pantomime used to be in the old Theatre Royal, which 
was burnt down, I think, in February 1880. It was a huge 
place, or so we thought it, with a great stage and the whole 
floor pit — none of your stalls and parterres. My father once 
brought eleven children to the pantomime in three cabs, and 

[31] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

used to say afterwards that more looked at him than at the 
stage. 

Pantomime was pantomime in those days. Fairies were 
fairies, in exquisite frilly frocks of pink and green and blue, 
disappearing down long forest aisles, for which the modern 
skimped stage would afiford no room. The horrible vul- 
garisation which has fallen upon the fairy classics in our 
unhappy days was yet far away. There were no suggestive 
tights and fleshings ; no public-house humour ; no music-hall 
songs. The pantomime made Fairyland just a little more 
realisable to the children, since they saw with their bodily 
eyes what they knew to exist. 

My father was the big, beneficent fairy godfather of my 
very little days. My mother was a large, placid, fair woman, 
who became an invalid at an early age and influenced my 
life scarcely at all. While I was still very little, before the 
family had grown, before there was an invalid mother, I 
have beautiful memories of my father. There were the sum- 
mer Sundays when we drove away up to the Dublin moun- 
tains or to spend the day at some farmhouse. One such house 
I remember covered outside with creepers, with roses over 
a trellised porch and white-washed walls under a thatched 
roof. There w^as a river close by with a waterfall, and 
someone took us to the yard to see the chickens fed. There 
were stacks of straw, and the sound of the waterfall. Every 
room was a little up or a little down, with steps : there was 
a long, narrow corridor, lit from above : and in the bed- 
rooms of the buxom girls there were some delightful things. 
They allowed us to turn out a work-box which had mother- 
o' -pearl reels and all manner of quaint things. 

I think there must have been only two little girls of an age 
for these excursions. There are no boys in the picture 
and no elder sisters. No mother either. She would prob- 

[32] 



MISTS AND SHADOWS 

ably stay at home to look after her brood. She was the 
mid-Victorian woman and found an engrossing occupation 
in being the mother of eleven. My father was "clubable," 
and eager for such pleasures as came his way. So off we 
would go of a Sunday morning, in a high dog-cart behind 
a good horse, my father driving and the two small girls 
up beside him : and presently we would be in sight of the 
mountains and amid the fields. Once we must have been 
out-at-toes. It was the day of the hoops and smart boots 
with shiny leather let in at the toes, and the shiny leather 
did not wear well. I remember his knocking up an obliging 
bootmaker and fitting us out with new boots. I can recall 
the very feel of the foot-measure as my foot was put into 
it and smell the leather in the dim room at the back of the 
shut-up shop. 

These special delights belong to early childhood. The 
eleven were too much for him later. He it was who was 
responsible for the children's parties, the Christmas Trees, 
the magic-lanterns. He used to come home laden with 
Christmas toys and the things for the Tree. My mother 
used to rebuke him for extravagance. I accompanied him 
once on a Christmas expedition to a Cave of Aladdin in 
South Great George's Street, under the shadow of PIm's 
drapery shop, which was always referred to in those days 
as "a Monster House.'' I was in fear and trembling lest 
it should fall upon me. 

The toy of that year represented a parson with an ass's 
head; a hollow body for sweets and the head to screw off. 
It must have been the time of Disestablishment, and I sup- 
pose there was friction at the time and wild parsons. It 
must have been a very popular toy, for my father was no 
bigot. Yet several of those semi-ecclesiastical figures hung 
on our Christmas Tree that year. 

[33] 



CHAPTER III 

LIFE AND DEATH 

From '67 to '69 — approximately — there was darkness in- 
stead of the mists and shadows. My father used to tell an 
entirely conventional story of my reading a newspaper to 
the family doctor at so early an age that my speech was 
understood by my contemporaries only. Discovering that 
I was really reading, or attempting to read, he rebuked my 
father severely, warning him that because of those early 
exercises I should probably end as an idiot. 

I apologise for telling anything so banal. Whether the 
doctor's gloomy prediction would have been fulfilled if I 
had gone on reading newspapers I know not, but some time 
in the later sixties I suddenly passed into darkness. I had 
ulcers on the eyes, and my only memory of that time is of 
a child sitting on a stool, her face buried in a chair — to 
avoid the light doubtless. A long dream of pain and shrink- 
ing from light were those days or months or years. I think 
I have heard that my eye trouble lasted nearly two years, 
during which time my father carried me from doctor to 
doctor. 

I believe the eye trouble was the result of a chill caught 
after measles, which at that time was considered a negligible 
complaint. Measles and scarlet fever were then accepted 
as the common lot. In our own days I have heard a highly 
intelligent Irishman, a man of affairs, political and literary, 
say that if one of his children had measles he would turn 
all the others into the same room, so as to get it all over 
at once. The Irish are a conservative people. I remember 
nothing about the measles proper, but only the result. I 

[34] 



LIFE AND DEATH 

do remember having a sister ill with scarlet fever and there 
being no attempt at isolation beyond the fact that she was 
removed from the upper nursery floor to the floor beneath, 
where we passed her open door twenty times a day. On 
one occasion, having been sent downstairs with a message 
and catching a glimpse through the door ajar of sponge 
cakes and oranges — or was it saffron-cakes? saffron-cakes 
were esteemed in those days as highly efficacious for the 
sick — I peeped within. The sick nurse was absent from the 
room and the patient seemed to be asleep. I crept a little 
further, laid my hand upon a cake. Suddenly the patient 
bounced out of bed and dragged the delicacy from me, push- 
ing me forcibly out of the room. I did not contract the 
scarlet-fever. 

My father, despite the eleven, was always the one to rise 
to an emergency. He carried me from doctor to doctor. 
My sight was despaired of. He was told it was no use. 
At last he found the right man, Dr. Biggar of Harcourt 
Street. I keep his name in grateful memory. I remember 
the double hall doors of the house that opened to receive 
us. I remember the wire blinds in the windows of the 
consulting-room, where the doctor's finger and thumb lifted 
the eyelids that it was a torture to keep open. Nothing more 
than that ; but presently I was reading again and the dark- 
ness was a family tradition. 

I do not know what time my birthday was lost. I suppose 
eleven birthdays were too many to keep. I was always told 
my birthday was February the 3rd. I was glad it was Feb- 
ruary the 3rd. I love February with its changing lights and 
dappled skies, its first song of the thrush, its pushing of 
green spear-heads above earth, February suited me in every 
way. The amethyst is its stone and I adore amethysts and 
the amethyst colours. The other portents agreed excellently 

[35] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

with me. The 3rd of February was held in honour by a 
small and increasing circle. Imagine, then, my amazement 
when a birth-certificate being required some few years ago, 
I read in black and white that I was born on the 23rd of 
January. January has only one thing to be said for it : it 
is followed by February. Nothing so well becomes it as 
its passing. It was an outrage to be offered a January birth- 
day. I prefer to believe or to think I believe, that registers 
were ill-kept in those days when they were still a novelty in 
Ireland, and that the 23rd of January was meant for the 
3rd of February. 

I think it must have been because of the darkness that I 
remember so little about those stirring years in Ireland. Of 
'67, the year of the Fenian rising, I remember very little, 
though it would have been much talked of in my home. I 
remember my mother telling my father that a neighbour had 
been in to say that "Bernard" had got home. Bernard had 
been out on the Dublin mountains that bitter night of March, 
1867, when the abortive rising of the Fenians was quenched 
in the snow. The poor boys — they were mostly very 
young — were creeping back to their homes in Dublin for 
weeks afterwards. In later years I have heard a County 
Dublin magistrate and churchwarden, an English settler,, 
and more beloved by the Irish than the Irish, tell how on 
that night of March he guided a party of Fenians from the 
fields where the snow had blotted out the hedgerows, to the 
high road. I remember in later years speaking to Michael 
Davitt of the Fenian movement, my impressions being 
coloured by the memory of those poor boys creeping back, 
sick and exhausted. "It was not at all a forlorn hope," he 
said. "We had 14,000 Fenians in the army alone, and they 
were picked men." 

It would have been some time later. Among summer 

[36] 



LIFE AND DEATH 

fields, parched white with a summer heat good to think upon 
in this desolate summer, I can see a young farmer with a 
sunburnt face sitting on the side of a ditch. I can hear him 
cursing Massey and Corydon, the informers — whose treach- 
ery had set the people in a blaze of fury. 

Up to this time we had been living in Dublin. Some- 
where about 1868 my father acquired the lands and house 
of Whitehall, Clondalkin, where my later childhood and 
youth were to be spent. The house had once belonged to 
Curran, the great Irish lawyer and patriot, whose daughter, 
Sarah, should have married Robert Emmet. It was a small 
cottage building with little windows under immense over- 
hanging eaves of thatch and a hall door within a porch 
of green trellis. There was a very quaint little lawn in 
front in which grew an immense tree-peony, a fuchsia as 
big, and a great many Portugal laurels and laurestinus. 
The cottage was flanked by a building of two stories. The 
lower story was the kitchen of the cottage. Its green door 
opened on a long strip of courtyard. There was a stone 
bench by the door, useful for many things. 

Our first summer there was 1869, when we children were 
there in charge of a nurse. The house had not yet been 
altered to accommodate a family. Of the two-story edifice 
only one-fourth belonged to us. My father's steward and his 
wife lived In half the lower story and the upper floor. What 
had been a door of communication was boarded up and filled 
in with a row of shelves. 

Our kitchen was a true toy-kitchen. It was whitewashed 
and floored with red tiles. One little window with a deep 
sill looked down the strip of courtyard : another, exactly 
alike, looked into an orchard which, I think now, must 
have been a fairyland. There was a settle under one window 
on which a child could stand and read by the hour, her 

[37] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

book laid open on the deep sill which propped her elbows 
when she would lean with her hands in her curls. 

My mother had pantries full of china, beautiful old china 
for the most part, and that sent down for our use was a 
delicate embossed china with a pattern in greyish brown of 
all manner of sea-shells. The pieces stood on the little rows 
of shelves and they seem to me a part of the enchantment 
of the place. From the kitchen a door opened into a dining- 
room. Beyond that was a hall, from which three little bed- 
rooms opened : beyond that a drawing-room, with a glass 
door leading into an old walled garden full of flowers and 
fruit. Close by the end gable of the house, a green paling 
a-top of a low white wall overlooked the orchard, and there 
was a wicket gate to the orchard round' the corner just out 
of sight. 

It must have been one of the few great summers that come 
to Ireland. The cottage was wrapped up in monthly roses 
and woodbine — honeysuckle is the clover blossom in Ire- 
land — fuchsias, jessamine, and the hardy yellow Scotch 
rose. These put out tendrils and climbed the thatch. In one 
room a tendril had come through the window and boldly 
climbed a wall and spread, and no one had detached it. 

In the orchard and the garden the low fruit-trees stood 
thick. They were mainly apple-trees. Three sorts I keep 
in my memory. One was the Irish peach, of which there 
were several. A little low, gnarled one which had planted 
itself among the flower-beds at some prehistoric period is 
in my mind as though it had life. Its fruit ripened first 
and it bore well. The apples, though they were small, were 
of a delicious flavour. Long after the peach-apples were 
done there was a tree hanging over our summer-house, the 
fruit of which yellowed with the autumn leaves and were 
so many honey morsels. There was a third tree with apples 

[38] 



LIFE AND DEATH 

of a pale green, the sides broadly ribbed and mottled with 
spots. I have no name for these delights, and a tragedy be- 
fell — for in the autumn following that summer the trees 
were thinned, and the most beautiful were cut down. No 
one thought of consulting the children, who had the best 
knowledge of good and bad fruit after all. 

Fortunately the little tree in the flower-beds survived and, 
so far as I know, still survives. Spanish iris clustered about 
its feet, with forget-me-nots and wallflowers and narcissi, 
with masses of pansies. The beds with their box borders 
made a most intricate pattern, all the tiny walks leading 
towards the summer-house. There was a deal of greenery, 
as there always is in an Irish garden: and when the lilies 
sprang up every July they looked like rows of young angels. 

Was it in '68 or was it in '69 ? Whatever year it was it 
was the great summer. Think of a pack of children who 
had lived in the town and only had the country by snatches 
turned loose a whole summer in this place packed with old- 
fashioned delights. 

The little rooms were very flowery. Because we were on 
the ground floor perhaps, with only a nurse in charge, we 
had our windows shuttered of nights. A long slit of light 
used to come between the shutters in the golden mornings, 
suffusing the room with a green and golden light. 

For a time we had a perilous delight, for a bull grazed 
in the orchard and would sometimes lift his head to roar 
quite at the window-pane. You can imagine the delighted 
terror of the child who lay a-bed, the formidable beast only 
separated from her by a thin sheet of glass : and what a 
joy it was to peep through the slit in the shutters at the 
immense head with its splendid curls, knowing one's self 
unseen, but not unapprehended, for the bull would occa- 

[39] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

sionally paw the earth as though scenting an enemy, and 
utter a roar like thunder. 

That summer we learned all the country delights, having 
only known them before by snatches. There was a big farm- 
yard and a hay-yard or rick-yard. The rick-yard is always 
associated in my mind with Hans Andersen's Ugly Duck- 
ling, which I must have read at the time. I always im- 
agined the Ugly Duckling's mother sitting hatching her 
eggs under the great docks in the rick-yard. Side by side 
with it ran the very pond where the Ugly Duckling met 
with one of his most terrifying adventures. The pond was 
much overgrown and deep enough to make it an adventure 
to reach the islet in the midst, on which a water-hen lived 
and reared her brood. On a summer day when all was 
still you would see the little ones taking to the water, just 
emerged from the egg, their brothers and sisters yet perhaps 
in the eggs only chipping beneath the mother's breast. 

There too was a well, clear and cool, which had the repu- 
tation of never drying up even In the hottest summer. It 
was cool and dark under its hood of stone over which wet 
lichens and water-weeds had grown. It smelt of streams 
and freshness, a mirage for London in the hot days. We 
used to dip in a jug or pail and bring up little silvery min- 
nows — "pinkeens" we called them — swimming round and 
round in the cool pure water. The well was fed from the 
mountains and the water chattered over beds of jewels in 
all the ditches. It was always summer there in my thoughts 
of it. The snail in his shell hanging on the thorn had a 
most wonderful house of opal iridescence. There were little 
blue moths, which I have never seen in England, flying about 
among the flowers, and black or brown butterflies with 
blotches of crimson on their wings. There must have been 
autumn though, for I remember the crab-apples in the hedge- 

[40] 



LIFE AND DEATH 

rows, a fairy fruit for beauty, and the quickes-berries hang- 
ing like drops of blood. I remember the loneliness of 
autumnal fields after the reaping was over, the gathering of 
blackberries and mushrooms, the pleasant terror of the Moat 
which was a fairy rath, in the heart of it a dry quarry where 
the biggest and juiciest blackberries grew. Gathering them 
one never liked to be far from one's companions, lest harm 
befell. In the evening when it was dark it was pleasant 
to steal out and see the darkness of the Moat at a distance : 
and when the misted harvest moon rose above it we thought 
it was a fairy fire and it afforded us a marvel for many 
days to come. Then there were the ripe apples, so to be sure 
it must have been autumn sometime. 

Every Sunday morning our excellent nurse trailed the 
whole family off to Mass. We used to take a short cut, 
being always rather pressed for time, across a field in which 
grazed the bull — his name was Young Leviathan, and he 
deserved it — that bellowed at our ears. There must have 
been seven or eight children for the intrepid woman to con- 
vey unhurt. We were happy when the bull grazed in a 
remote corner far from the pathway. What a scurry it used 
to be! There was a gate leading from the field on to the 
road, which was padlocked : and the gap by which we 
emerged had a steep descent. The bull usually discovered 
us before we were clear. I have a vivid memory of his 
charge as I tumbled down the steep ditch. That was the 
occasion, I think, on which another child lost her shoe, leav- 
ing it to the tender mercies of the bull. We used to re- 
turn by a safe detour, which was slower and less exciting. 
I have often wondered since at the hardihood of that nurse. 

The village "innocent" used sometimes to put in his fool- 
ish head terrifying us at our games. He looked like Smike 
in the Hablot K. Browne illustrations to Nicholas Nickleby 

[41] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

and he had a mordant wit. He made remarks about your 
personal appearance unless you were very civil. He and 
his kind have for the greater part disappeared or been 
gathered into asylums. Not all. Back again in Ireland 
I meet a God's fool from time to time as I walk the country 
lanes, a ruddy-faced, weather-beaten man who talks inces- 
santly with a running laugh between the speech. Some- 
times his talk is unintelligible — but again it is of the im- 
mortality of the soul. "The Kingdom of Heaven's within 
you. The soul's its own place and can make Heaven or 
Hell. The soul or the mind : it's all the same. But where 
does the soul go when it's out of the body — tell me that." 

He sums up Irish intolerance of disagreement in a preg- 
nant phrase. "Over there," he says, waving his hand across 
the Irish Sea, "you can say what you like. But here they'd 
knock the gob off you." 

That autumn after the golden summer I had my first in- 
timate experience of death. We had gone back to town and 
then hurriedly returned to the country because of the ill- 
ness of the elder sister just home from the convent school 
and only awaiting impatiently the time when she might re- 
turn to its novitiate. It was October then and the country 
was in ruins — only a few late apples on the trees and the 
wind and the rain bringing down the last leaves. That 
eldest sister was my first love. I thought her the most won- 
derful creature. Something of the innocency and fragrance 
of the convent hung about her, making her elusive, saint- 
like. She had brought home her sheaves, among them a 
glass-topped table painted with flowers behind which silver 
foil gave depths of light to the colours. I hung over that 
table entranced. She had her drawings — and I was not 
critical. Various triumphs of needlework in the shape of 
cushions, antimacassars, tea-cosies, and the like, dazzled me. 

[42] 



LIFE AND DEATH 

She sang 'The Bridge," words by Longfellow, and my heart 
wept tears as I listened. I am not sure that it does not 
weep now. I had to hide behind window curtains to con- 
ceal my agitation when she sang. 

She was just a brief lovely vision. I have no memory of 
her at all before that vacation. She knew I adored her and 
she petted me. She let me see just a glimpse of her super- 
natural secret. It made me determined to be a nun, and the 
determination lasted for a good dozen of years afterwards. 
There was something Heavenly in the vision, something of 
long convent corridors, dazzling clean, flooded with light 
and air, sweet with the smell of lilies and a thought of in- 
cense, of little convent cells naked and pure, of convent 
gardens, places where 

"The Bride of Christ 
Lies hid, emparadised." 

I was allowed to wait on her the first day of her illness, 
and she must have been a little delirious, for she talked of 
strange things and then apologised gently. How I loved to 
be her servant, her slave ! 

Then we were back in the country again and it was sad. 
I lived with my nose in a book. Sometimes my father came 
with a disturbed face. There was a talk of a crisis. "Next 
Tuesday about will be the crisis. Till after that we cannot 
hope for good tidings." 

I read and read incessantly. The nurse, who was a some- 
what harassing person, let me be. I suppose she was glad 
that one of us should be off her hands. I was reading 
Picciola, the Prison Flower, in my favourite place for read- 
ing now that the wet autumn had come, kneeling on a table 
in front of one of the deep-set little windows of the cottage, 
on the sill of which rested my open book and my elbows. 

[43] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Below the window was the stone bench upon which the 
beggars used to take a seat, or the tinker when he mended 
our pots and pans. There I had sat and shelled peas for a 
summer's day dinner, and had eaten the peas as I shelled 
them, giving up only a basket of empty pods to my justly 
enraged nurse. 

There came a father with a more disturbed face than ever, 
working as we looked at him, his voice tangled in his throat. 
After a while he spoke. "Mary is dead," he said, and rushed 
away into the rain. Desolation swept my soul for a space. 
I do not know how long. Presently, with a sensation of 
guilt, I returned to the reading of Picciola, the Prison 
Flozver. Even for death a book did not fail of comfortable 
distraction in those days when Heaven was a vision of story- 
books, to be read incessantly without any troublesome elder 
intervening. 



[44] 



CHAPTER IV 

CHILDHOOD 

In the late sixties and early seventies an extraordinary wave 
of Puritanism passed over the Catholic Church in Ireland. 
The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin was Paul, Cardinal 
Cullen, a great Churchman but, one imagines, lacking in 
the human qualities. It must have been about that time that 
the priests began to wage war on the cross-road dances and 
other gaieties of Irish rural life. One is persuaded of their 
excellent intentions. Perhaps the cross-road dances and 
their incidents were not always decorous or desirable. The 
priest was doubtless eaten up by the desire for the moral 
good of his flock. Morality in the narrowest application 
of the word has always been high in Ireland : and its oppo- 
site, in the narrowest sense, the enemy, beyond all other sins, 
of a celibate priesthood. 

The trouble was that these foregatherings of young people 
being swept away there was nothing to replace them. Rural 
life in Ireland became dreadfully dull. Among an imagina- 
tive and emotional people the manage de convenance be- 
came shamefully and shamelessly the rule. The people 
drifted away to America, where they could do what they 
liked without the intervention of the priests. The manage 
de convenance, it was discovered too late, was not altogether 
for the good of the race. Some thoughtful priests have 
discovered this for themselves now that Ireland is becom- 
ing depopulated in a tragical degree. 

I will give my impressions of the Irish priests elsewhere, 
only saying here, lest I should be misunderstood, that I have 
the greatest admiration for their devotion, self-sacrifice, and 

[45] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

nobility of character. Whatever they did in the direction 
of sweeping away rural gaieties was done, one is sure, with 
the highest motives. My own personal knowledge of that 
Puritan wave was chiefly concerned with the limitation of 
my reading. I remember when my mother took away from 
me Aurora Floyd and locked it in a perpetually locked book- 
case, leaving only an impression which lasts to this day of 
a golden-haired lady in whose fortunes I had so passionate 
an interest that it was a cruel fate indeed to have my follow- 
ing of them cut short. 

I was forbidden all but good-book reading that Lent, 
and very little of the good-book reading, since my mother, 
no sooner did she see me looking upon printed matter, cried 
out that the child would destroy her eyes. This argument 
against my reading went side by side with the other, e.g. 
that all novel-reading was a thing to be abhorred by good 
Catholics. 

I look back on those years as a series of encounters in 
which I fought for reading and my mother, at times, frus- 
trated me. She thought my prayers should be a satisfactory 
substitute for my reading. I did not think so, even though 
the convent glimmered like a pale star before me. And I 
resorted to subterfuges in order to gratify what was a vital 
necessity. 

It was a time when dancing was prohibited to Irish 
Catholics — at least what was called "fast dancing" at that 
time. I have heard a Catholic lady of unimpeachable piety 
and orthodoxy attribute in later life something of her ill 
health to the prohibition of dancing in her youth. It was 
the one exercise in which she delighted. I believe that abso- 
lution was withheld from those who danced "fast dances" : 
and since a ball cannot be limited to quadrilles it may be 

[46] 



CHILDHOOD 

imagined what a blight fell upon social life in Catholic 
Ireland. 

A third prohibition was the theatre. Except in so far 
as regarded the pantomime I was not concerned with the 
theatre in those days any more than I was with "fast 
dancing." It was the prohibition of the novel which affected 
me ; and I found my way to wriggle out of that. 

Perhaps it was only the very orthodox who accepted 
these hard counsels of perfection. But then Catholic Ire- 
land was unquestioningly orthodox in those days. The 
martyrdom of the priest in penal days, when, as you went 
through the country you might come at any moment on a 
brown-frocked Franciscan or a Seminary priest in his vest- 
ments hanging on the bough of a tree — when a priest's head 
bore the same price as a wolf's — those days had borne fruit. 
The priest was sacrosanct. There was no criticism of his 
actions any more than there might be of the will of Heaven. 

Still there were murmurs. Cardinal Cullen and the Irish 
bishops generally had been stern enemies of Fenianism. It 
was whispered with horror that Dr. Moriarty, Bishop of 
Kerry, in other respects a man in advance of his age — he 
was for flooding Trinity College with Catholics at a time 
when there was the sternest prohibition against a Catholic's 
entering the college of Queen Elizabeth — had said that Hell 
was not bad enough nor eternity long enough to punish the 
Fenians. In my own home the Fenians were looked upon 
as stainless heroes of a lost cause, martyrs for Ireland, and 
doubtless it was so in thousands of homes — so that there 
were murmurings. The Fenians or those privy to their 
plans and purposes were practically excommunicated. Only 
the Orders admitted them to the Sacraments where the secu- 
lar priesthood were forbidden to do it. Ellen O'Leary, John 
O'Leary's sister, told me long vears after how an old Jesuit 

[47] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

priest at Gardiner Street received and absolved the Fenians ; 
and doubtless there was plenty of sympathy with them out- 
side the Bishops' palaces. But many an old Fenian railed 
upon the Church till the day he died, always excepting this 
or that member of an Order who had not felt himself bound 
by the Bishop's commands and should be the means of recon- 
ciling him with the Church at last. 

Again — who shall blame the Bishops? To them the 
Fenians were insidious foes who cajoled the trusting and 
innocent boys into the secret societies which were so often 
the tool and the instrument of the British domination in 
Ireland. Who shall blame them? 

But to the matter of my reading. It was always my 
mother who cried "Don't," and my father who said "Let 
her be." To be sure my father was often abroad and the 
rule of my mother was more intimate, more compelling. 
It was my father who brought books into the house, mis- 
cellaneous lots picked up at auctions, of the most varied 
kind. He had no belief in a censorship. I cannot recall 
that he ever told me not to read any book, although I must 
have read some curious ones under his eyes. If he gave 
my reading any direction it was towards poetry — Irish Na- 
tional poetry for the most part and often turgid stuff, though 
of an unimpeachable loftiness of tone. He had belonged 
to a Mitchel Club in his boyhood. In the Mitchel Clubs, 
named after John Mitchel, were enrolled the youthful ad- 
herents of the Young Ireland Party. He adored the men 
of '48. The ringing rhetoric of their poetry had its pas- 
sionate appeal for him. I think poetry perhaps came easier 
to him than prose, for I might have read Mitchel' s Jail 
Journal with advantage and I did not. I read Davis, Duffy's 
Spirit of the Nation, D'Arcy Magee and Meagher of the 

[48] 



CHILDHOOD 

Sword. A good deal of it was indifferent reading from an 
artistic point of view. 

Lady Wilde had been one of his great admirations. It 
had been a shock to him when he first beheld her fighting 
her way, like any man, he said, into some banquet or other. 
He was too masculine not to demand extreme femininity 
in his heroines. He still loved her verse though she had 
disappointed him. 

There was a long row, in dull chocolate covers, of Miss 
Edge worth's books in the top shelf of the Georgian book- 
case which now holds my most treasured volumes. I really 
believe Castle Rackrent was missing, and what a loss that 
was! My memory of Maria is of a faded fashionable 
eighteenth-century atmosphere. I know I read Belinda over 
and over and many others of Belinda's sort. Perhaps they 
gave my mind a distinct bent towards the eighteenth century 
of which I am certainly an amateur. In that miscellaneous 
reading there was Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris, with 
thousands of pictures. Horrible it always seemed to me, 
but I read it nevertheless. There were some early volumes 
of the Cornhill, of the Family Friend, and Once a Week. 
I am tolerably certain that I did not read the Mysteries of 
Paris while I was under my mother's eye. That must have 
come later with James Grant and Dumas and G. W. M. 
Reynolds — a finely assorted lot. I had almost forgotten 
the Parlour Library in shiny green boards. In that I must 
have read Mansfield Park and Emma: but I remember 
better Sidonia the Sorceress and some of Mrs. Gore's and 
Mrs, Trollope's stories. The great Jane was wasted on my 
tender age. 

When the supply of books gave out I fell back on papers. 
Penny story-papers were even worse than novels in my 
mother's sight. I acquired them all the same — The London 

[49] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Reader, The London Journal, The Family Herald. I de- 
plore my duplicity, but I must acknowledge it. I used to 
pass under mother's unsuspecting gaze, simply stiff with 
papers which I had pushed up between my frock and my 
stays. My mother was then, I suppose, tending towards 
her long illness. She did not climb to the very top of the 
house where I sat reading myself blind by twilight. There 
was another surer refuge — the loft over the stables at the 
end of a narrow town garden. There was generally a horse 
in the stable, but he was too much accustomed to the sight 
of a small girl ascending and descending by the square 
aperture above his head to take much notice. There were 
two long oval, windows, criss-crossed by a trellis, each side 
of the loft. There was a heap of hay to lie on. The ovals 
on the house-side looked into a sycamore. From that day 
to this I can recall the hay-smelling, dusty darkness with the 
most delightful sense of escape, of freedom. 

It must have been in the holidays that I made friends 
with a pair of country sisters who kept a more delicious 
shop than I have ever found in the pages of any book — a 
shop of pure romance. There were two windows. On one 
side of the shop they sold butter, eggs, bread, and sugar- 
sticks. The butter and eggs used to come up from their 
parental farm in the Queen's County, and my impression 
of them is that they were real country delights. With the 
other side of the shop I was more immediately concerned. 
The glass cases on the counter had a miscellaneous assort- 
ment of stationery, scented pink paper, violet ink, and all 
the other guilelessnesses of the seventies. They were 
flanked by newspapers and magazines. The window was 
full of story-books — the lurid harmless stories in which boys 
rejoiced, and others. But the crowning delight to me was 
the circulating library which sat round about the shelves 

[50] 



CHILDHOOD 

at that side of the shop. What a heaven it was ! Even now 
I can feel the ecstasy of touching those green and scarlet and 
blue backs of books and knowing that I might read what I 
would. 

The owners of this delightful shop made much of me. 
They also made use of me, for when they would have their 
mid-day sleep they turned me on to mind the shop. I think 
my dream of reading was practically uninterrupted. I can- 
not remember anyone buying the eggs or butter, although 
they were so good. My mother waited long for her sealing- 
wax or whatever it was that first day. I sucked "lemon 
plait" and I read and would not have changed places with 
an angel. 

After that I think this delightful experience must have 
been repeated from time to time. I remember a day when 
I sold a coloured picture from a Christmas number which 
had adorned the shop for some months, to an old lady for 
a shilling. It was the audacity of ignorance to ask such a 
sum, but the old lady paid it. remarking that it was just 
the picture she required for her grandchild's nursery. I re- 
member the delight of the two sisters when they emerged, 
rosy from their sleep, to discover the coup I had made. 

That must have been in the early seventies, and in a 
vacation, for I am sure it was a brief delight. But while it 
lasted I sucked up enough stories to keep myself and others 
going when the bookless desert was upon me of schooldays 
in a convent : or at least it was a bookless desert as far as 
stories were concerned. 

I remember the consternation in Dublin over the rout of 
the French in the great war. I was then going to what was 
called a young ladies' school. I think it was one of those 
places of genteel inefficiency to which in Victorian days they 
sent children to keep them out of the way of their elders. 

[51] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I am sure I never learnt anything there, although an elder 
sister achieved a pair of hand-screens in berlin-wool and 
bead work, designed to shade the face from the fire. Every- 
one in time achieved a similar pair of screens if they stayed 
long enough. The preparation for the screens v^as a kettle- 
holder in berlin-wool-work with the inscription "Polly put 
the Kettle on." The word kettle was represented by the 
thing itself with a curl of steam coming from the spout. 
The summit of my desires at one time was to achieve such 
a kettle-holder, but I don't think I ever realised it. 

It was however a sign of the times that as we went home 
from school we came upon schoolboys fighting the battles 
over again; but since no one could be found to take the 
part of the Prussians the attacking armies advanced upon 
the gables of unoccupied houses and the like, and riddled 
them with volleys of stones, shouting battle cries as they 
charged. 

Dublin was a sleepy place in those days, before the intro- 
duction of the trams. There is a Dutch feeling about bits 
of it, to my memory. There was a canal by which stacks 
of turf came into Dublin, the boats tugged along slowly 
by leisurely horses. A little earlier there was passenger 
traffic on the canals. The nurse who had charge of us in 
the country used to boast genteelly that her father was cap- 
tain of a fly-boat — i.e. the boats for passenger traffic on 
the canal. The canal was bordered by beautiful trees and 
there were fine houses behind high walls, and a rope-walk, 
and the quaint low dwellings which seem to grow naturally 
by the waterside. There was a Spa in the grounds of the 
house on the canal-banks which belonged to Henry Grattan, 
and at that time to his daughter. The Spa was walled away 
from the grounds so that the public could approach it. The 
water trickled from a little pipe in the rocks. In early days 

[52] 



CHILDHOOD 

it had its neat white-aproned custodian who gave you the 
water in a clean glass for a penny. Later there was no 
custodian and the public or a bad section of it made the 
Spa impossible. I don't know if the Spa has disappeared, 
but Henry Grattan's park is now cut up into little squares 
and streets of red-brick houses. 

Do I remember or did I only hear the tales of it after- 
wards? If I remember I could have been no more than 
three years old when there was a shouting and a crying that 
an omnibus full of people had been driven into the canal on 
a dark, foggy night. I know my father was there, trying 
to rescue the people. 

The 'bus had fallen into the lock. Someone — was it the 
lock-keeper or the driver ? — in a moment of panic opened the 
lock gates, with an idea of floating the 'bus, with the result 
that every creature was drowned. 



[S3] 



CHAPTER V 

SCHOOL DAYS 

About 1872, on a suggestion of an old friend of my father's 
that I was running wild, it was decided that I should go to a 
convent school, and the one chosen for me was the Sienna 
Convent Drogheda. The matter apparently was urgent, for 
I was sent there in mid-vacation and came to a green garden- 
place of quiet restfulness with no work doing and no pupils 
remaining except a few whose parents were at the ends of 
the earth. 

It was a good August, and we sat about the grounds with 
the nuns, doing such things as pleased us, talking or read- 
ing if we would. Or we would walk about the convent 
garden — a nun in our midst, the privileged ones hanging 
on to an arm, the less fortunate at a greater distance. The 
established pupils had their strips of fine embroidery, their 
needlework of various kinds. I came to the convent school 
with the reputation of being a great reader and I was asked 
many questions about the books I had read. It was a far 
cry from the novelists of the day and earlier to the reading 
of the only light literature the school library contained. 
These were the guileless novels of Lady Georgina Fuller- 
ton, the Heir of Redclyffe, the Fahiola of Cardinal Wise- 
man, the Callista of Cardinal Newman, Adelaide Proctor's 
poems, and a little volume of verse which had a great vogue 
in mid-Victorian days. It was, as well as I remember, 
by the author of "Ezekiel," "Ezekiel" being, I presume, an 
earlier volume. It will be seen that the nuns were not illib- 
eral, since there are two Protestant authors to four Catholic 
in this Httle list. 

[54] 



SCHOOL DAYS 

Whatever honey was to be got out of the convent library 
I sucked and sucked dry, and began over again. These 
"worldly" volumes were, by the way, reserved for holidays 
and feasts. On ordinary days if we had a book it was of 
the spiritual kind. One sucked what honey one could out 
of a prettily written History of England and out of the 
hour or half-hour's reading of a story-book at night before 
prayers. A nun read aloud and we clustered about her with 
our fancy work to listen. We had the Heir of Redely ffe in 
this way and the other romances. I don't think they were 
ever added to, so when the list was exhausted it began all 
over again. 

When the nun carhe to a passage of love-making — there 
were several in the Heir of Redely ffe — she would turn very 
red, and laugh, or she would say with contempt that what 
followed was great nonsense. The result was the same, 
for the love-making passages were huddled away out of 
sight to our extreme disgust and disappointment. 

For other reading, well, we had the Lives of the Saints 
read aloud to us at meals, we taking it in turn to perform 
that duty. I don't think I derived much enjoyment from 
that reading — the Lives were drily told — except when I 
myself was the reader. I enjoyed thoroughly "taking the 
flure" as we call it in Ireland, and thought I read much 
better than other people. 

But some one must have written the legends of the Saints 
not drily, for from these convent schooldays I carried away 
a store of beautiful legends, and I don't think I dug them 
out of Alban Butler. 

I daresay, after all, the strict convent regimen as regarded 
reading matter was a clarifying process for me. I was read- 
ing too much that was not literature, although I had my 
Dickens and Thackeray. I had a deal to get rid of. I had 

[ 55 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

read everything I could lay my hands on in my own home, 
except the Family Bible. We had a very handsome one, 
a Catholic Bible — was it Dr. Challoner's? It was a trans- 
lation which was published for the use of Catholics late in 
the eighteenth or early in the nineteenth century. I am 
pretty sure no Irish Catholic ever thought of reading it. 

I imagine that if it was the Authorised Version I should 
have been compelled to read it. The magic of its great style 
would have reached me through the embossed and tooled 
covers. Anyone so eager as I was for poetry would have 
leapt to it. As it was my version was an excellent, pure 
version, I am told, and much more accurate than the great 
English rendering, I never discovered it for myself. 

A very much more rigid piety prevailed at that time among 
Irish Catholics than at a later date. Please note that I say 
"rigid," for the earnest piety which is very general and is 
a part of the life of the people is particularly manifest to 
one coming from England, where religion keeps its last 
stronghold in the great middle-class. My father used to 
tell me that in his boyhood the labouring men in the fields, 
for the whole forty days of Lent, did not break their fast 
by so much as a drink of water till noon. At noon they had 
a meal of potatoes and buttermilk. I think he said they ab- 
stained from meat all during Lent, which was not so diffi- 
cult, since it seldom came their way. After the noonday 
meal they had nothing but a collation, i.e. four ounces of 
dry bread and a drink of water, between that and the next 
day's meal. I do not remember a time in my own home 
when, however tender our age, we did not keep the black 
fasts of Lent on "red"' tea and dry bread. They were a 
hardier race in Ireland then than they are to-day. 

Which brings me back to my Bible. Even in my young 
days the Old Testament at least was regarded by the ma- 

[56] 



SCHOOL DAYS 

jority of Catholics as a Protestant book. I daresay a good 
many people, Protestant as well as Catholic, thought that 
the Bible was written by a Protestant for Protestants. The 
Irish Protestants had laid violent hands on the Book and 
made it their own. They had brought evil deeds upon the 
peasantry in the Rebellion of '98, Bible in hand, finding 
full justification for their doings in the pages of the Old 
Testament. To myself its pages were smeared with blood 
and something more terrible than blood. No one ever 
taught me this feeling. I think the average well-to-do Irish 
Catholic simply regarded the Book as excellent for Protest- 
ants and went back to his or her Key of Heaven and Catho- 
lic Piety. It was amongst the hihlia abiblia. 

It would be quite wrong to suppose that the Irish Catholic 
could not have read the Scriptures if he would. In my mem- 
ory of Catholic Ireland the Family Bible was in every house 
of a modest prosperity. It was a handsome piece of furni- 
ture, and the births of the children were recorded in the 
front page as they might be in a Protestant household. Or, 
at least, they were in our Family Bible. I remember that 
at about the age of fourteen I engraved those dates elegantly 
on a sheet of laced paper and placed it in front of the family 
album. I was rather pleased with my work till an elder 
sister removed it. 

At the convent school we got the Bible in the shape of a 
dreadfully dull Bible history. No honey to be extracted 
from that at all. I believe the real honey of those days 
came by my observations of the life around me. 

The convent was old as such things go in Ireland. It 
had probably been originally a country house of the 
eighteenth century, although of course it had been much 
added to and extended. Somehow or other the nuns had 
crept back to it in the penal days, when they had passed 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

for a congregation of teaching ladies and had lain low. 
Probably some person of influence had protected them and 
they must have had good Protestant neighbours, else they 
would never have lived along till the days of tolerance. 

Everything about the convent was very old-fashioned. 
The nuns entered the convent usually from the schoolroom — 
or but a little later. No newspapers were allowed to dis- 
turb the convent atmosphere, no magazines ; nothing of what 
was happening outside in the world unless it came by word 
of mouth. The nuns talked, as doubtless they do to-day, 
of "out in the world," as though it was the other side of 
the world. The aloofness was never more justified. There 
was something mediaeval about that convent. The nuns 
were excellent musicians and linguists. They taught the 
ordinary subjects with ordinary success I imagine. But 
the progress of the world had stopped for them some ten 
or twenty or thirty or forty years before. Their books were 
old-fashioned. I well remember the intense indignation of 
the most capable of all the teachers, when, on her telling 
her class that the source of the Nile had never been dis- 
covered, Ten Years' Old, fresh from the newspapers of her 
vacation, cut in with : "Oh, yes, Dr. Livingstone discov- 
ered its source in Lake Victoria Nyanza." "And pray who 
is Dr. Livingstone?" Mother Alphonsus asked, shaking her 
veil and in contemptuous indignation moving on to some- 
thing else. 

A very simple curriculum indeed ! But what was it they 
did teach that was better than much learning? What was 
it that brought the gentlest, tenderest, loveliest of their 
pupils flying back to that white peace of the Convent from 
a rough and coarse world? What was it that made the 
most unworthy of their pupils, one with a keen eye for 

[58] 



SCHOOL DAYS 

their simplicities, resolve that a girl of hers should go 
nowhere else but to a convent school ? 

It was the heavenliness of the convent atmosphere. I can 
find no other word. 

I do not intend to convey that all the nuns were saints, 
although the very choice of the convent life carries with it, 
to my mind, a great measure of sanctity. One nun in my 
time, Mother Imelda, was such a saint I believe in the super- 
natural order as the Church loves to honour and set the 
seal of sainthood upon. Many of the nuns had their human 
defects, their weaknesses. Impossible to conceal them from 
the sharp eyes of school-girls. But if one laughs, one laughs 
tenderly. There were exquisite women among the nuns — 
beautiful women often. I used to think there never was 
such beauty as Sister Teresa's with her delicate classic pro- 
file, her face as finely moulded, as purely coloured as a 
Madonna lily, or Mother Joseph's with her opulent golden 
colouring, the magnificent intense blue of her eyes. Per- 
haps the white coif and habit and the black veil made the 
fittest frame for beauty. We might laugh at their simplici- 
ties, their innocencies. We might even discuss their little 
jealousies and preferences. But we left school in floods 
of tears : and doubtless a good many of those who left not 
to return found the change a hard one. 

Many outsiders have remarked on the grace, the beauty, 
the refinement of Irish girls of the shop-keeping and farm- 
ing classes, qualities not always shared by their brothers. 
Something of course is explained by the ups and downs of 
Irish history which have reduced the descendants of the 
old families to the cabins and placed the sons of the free- 
booters in the castles. But the convent schools afford the 
fullest explanation needed. Whatever of ladyhood is in 
a girl the convent school fosters and brings to perfection. 

[ 59 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

The convent school remains in my mind as a place of large 
and lofty rooms, snow-white, spotless, full of garden airs: 
of long corridors lit by deep windows, with little altars here 
and there — statues of Our Lord or the Blessed Virgin or 
the Saints, each with its flowers. A blue lamp burned at 
Our Lady's feet. The Sacred Heart had its twinkling red 
lamp. The corridors seem always in my thoughts of them 
full of quietness. The rustling of the nun's habit as she 
came only added to the sense of quietness. 

The floors were polished and beeswaxed as you see it in 
convents of to-day but seldom anywhere else, I imagine 
that housecraft was rarer among Irish women of all classes 
then than it is to-day. But housecraft is seen in its per- 
fection in a convent. What was it that made the girls who 
would have been slovenly at home fit in with the life so 
exquisitely neat and feat? Perhaps those of them who 
went back leavened the lump of indifference and unthrift. 
Certainly, coming back to Ireland after twenty years' ab- 
sence I find in the Irish households an order, an efficiency, 
which were rare in my young days. The ramshackle, the 
topsy-turvy, seem to be gone out of fashion. 

At the convent school we slept in dormitories which con- 
tained long lines of little iron beds curtained in blue and 
white check. The curtains went completely round the beds, 
and when they were drawn at night there was a sense of 
isolation which had its charm for one of an overflowing 
family who could appreciate dimly how many ills come from 
not being sufficiently alone. 

The long dormitory, with its thirty or forty beds, was 
lit and aired by a lunette at either end. That these were 
open at night I very much doubt. We had not yet got away 
from the superstition that night air was deadly. "You 
ought not to be out in the night air" was always said if you 

[60] 



SCHOOL DAYS 

had a cold or weakness. Florence Nightingale had swept it 
away in the Crimea some fifteen years earlier by her simple 
reply to a doctor's expostulation upon her admitting the 
enemy — "But the only air you can get at night is night-air." 
That reply had not yet reached Ireland. But — stay — I have 
a memory of revolving ventilators in the lunette above my 
head. They were highly scientific and advanced in those 
days, however our age might despise them. 

I can remember no lack of air as I lay between my check 
curtains with a feeling akin to George Herbert's when he 
made his thanksgiving — 

"Lord, Thou hast given me a little cell 
Wherein to dwell." 

I remember summer evenings there when we went to bed 
at 8.30 with the sun hardly yet below the horizon, or he 
had left his pinks and primroses and faint greens in the 
sky. At 9 everyone was in bed and quiet. At 9.30 a bell 
rang "Profound Silence" in the convent. Except for urgent 
reasons the silence must not be broken till 4 in the morning, 
when a lay sister entered the nun's cell, ofifering the holy 
water from a dripping finger with the wake-word — "Praise 
be to Jesus!" to which the other would respond "Amen!" 

They sang the Divine Office every day in that convent, an 
obligation laid only upon a limited number of orders of 
women. What is the order? Matins, Lauds, Prime, Tierce, 
Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. It necessitated a very 
early rising. The nuns used the Gregorian Chant, and at 
the hours of Office you might meet them hurrying through 
the corridors, chanting as they went. 

It was not always so easy to fall asleep in the summer 
evenings when you could hear, lying between the check cur- 
tains, the shouting from a distance which showed that the 

[61] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

world was yet up and living and doing. I remember stand- 
ing up in bed and peeping through the window. The thing 
in view was the graveyard of the nuns, an enclosed walled 
space with a wicket gate. From the high dormitory window 
you could see over the walls to the white marble slab at 
the head of the cemetery, on which was a list of the dead 
nuns. Of winter nights it used to glimmer whitely in the 
dark. There is always a chill feeling about the memory 
which makes me imagine that the beautifully coloured eve- 
ning must have been May's and a cold May's. 

There was only one looking-glass in the dormitory. Per- 
haps that fact began in me in the habit of never looking in 
a glass, which was confirmed by sharing a bedroom with 
one sister or another, of a more determined will perhaps, 
or a more pressing vanity than I possessed. Of course the 
modesty of the convent was extreme. When we washed 
our feet we looped our curtains in such a way that no eye 
could be upon us. 

We used to get up early in the morning — 6.30 in the sum- 
mer, 7 in winter, and hurry downstairs through the long 
kitchen corridor to the chapel for Mass. We always wore 
a black veil over our heads for Mass and a white veil for 
Communion days, so that we were like a little flock of nuns. 
We used to go down through one of the "bows." A sec- 
tion of the house was bow-shaped through its four stories. 
In each bow was the glass-screened and curtained door from 
floor to ceiHng which was the enclosure of the convent. The 
mystery of those doors which the world never passed had 
its irresistible appeal for me. Through the veils of the door 
you could see the shadowy figures of the nuns moving along 
the corridor beyond. That door shut off eternally the 
world from the cloister. 

In the chief one of the bows there was kept in a shrine of 

[62] 



SCHOOL DAYS 

ebony, ivory and silver the head of OHver Plunkett, Catholic 
Archbishop of Armagh, the martyr of the Titus Oates con- 
spiracy. After he had been beheaded his body was thrown 
into the fire, but a pious woman rescued the skull from the 
flames, hiding It in her apron. Visitors often came to the 
convent to see the relic, and were allowed to look upon 
the blackened and half-consumed skull. It was shown to 
us school-children as a sacred ceremony ; but being very pur- 
blind I had to take the word of others as to how it looked. 

Another relic of the convent was of St. Edward the Con- 
fessor. I do not remember what the relic was, but linen 
touched by it had an efficacy in cases of the King's Evil. 
I have certainly known the discharge to cease and the wound 
to close at the touch of linen which had touched the relic. 
The son of a blacksmith, named Whelan, in my father's em- 
ployment, who had scrofula, was at least healed for the time 
being by the application of the linen ; and I remember writ- 
ing to the nuns to procure it for other cases long after I 
had left school. Whether the trouble came back I cannot 
say. That it closed the wound I am certain, and you may 
explain the happening as you will. 

Once and once only I crossed the enclosure by the upper 
bow. It was to take a last glimpse of a dead school-fellow, 
who had had a somewhat lingering illness and had been taken 
into the convent for better nursing. It was July and hot 
July — just before the holidays it must have been, for the 
white lilies were standing up in the garden, and the dead 
girl lay between sheafs of lilies. From the garden where 
the cherries hung red in the nets we could see through the 
open window of her room the candles burning about the 
bed whereon she lay. They believed in familiarity with 
death in those days in Ireland, else it was a somewhat cruel 
ordeal to be brought to gaze on our dead school-fellow ; and 

[63] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

it gave some of us nervous terrors. Perhaps the nuns 
thought it was good for us. 

I have said that the convent cemetery stood up right 
in the midst of the garden where we walked and played. 
It was a dismal little place, being enclosed by high walls, 
the small iron crosses, bearing only initials, sinking deeper 
and deeper in the rank grass. Once we were terrified by 
the sight of a rusty black garment — just a piece of it, is- 
suing from the ground. It was whispered among us that 
it was the habit of a nun who had died in an outbreak of 
smallpox some years before. Whether we only imagined 
that, or whether it had any foundation in fact, I do not know. 

We accepted the dreary little graveyard in the midst of 
our playground as something we were too used to to mind. 
In front of the house was the nuns' garden, to which we 
only went as a special treat. That was a delightful garden, 
with fruit trees among the flower-beds, winding walks, 
grottoes, little shrines hollowed out of the trees containing 
a statue and flowers — all the innumerable ingenuities of a 
convent garden. There in recreation hours the young nuns, 
like a flock of doves, used to gather about the elder ones, 
and for an hour the garden was as noisy as a grove of star- 
lings. The nuns had made pets of the birds, and had tamed 
them so completely that you might see any day a bird 
perched prettily on a nun's head, feeding from her hands — 
even taking a crumb from her tongue. There was a convent 
dog, an Irish terrier, belonging to Sister Jane, the outdoor 
lay sister who presided over the fowls and the pigs and the 
kitchen garden, who could do all manner of clever things 
even to cobbling the nuns' shoes. 

On the whole I think we were extremely happy, healthy, 
and sane in the convent school. The graveyard did not 
daunt us. Neither did an old nun, Sister Catherine, who 

[64] 



SCHOOL DAYS 

was mad, but harmlessly so. They said it was the terror 
of an occasion when burglars broke into the convent that 
scared her out of her wits. She did pretty well what she 
liked, and it seems to me now that she must have been a 
fearsome apparition, for she went about bent almost double, 
her habit and veil, green with age, huddled upon her, as 
she leant on her stick, so that you caught a bare glimpse of 
a yellowed ivory face. I do not remember that she inspired 
any terror in us. 

The nuns were very simple. They certainly interview 
papas and brothers of the pupils in the convent parlour, 
or perhaps it was only selected ones who did. But when 
a plain British working-man came to set the convent clocks 
he was preceded through the corridors by a lay sister with 
her veil down to her eyes ringing a bell. The shame- 
faced humour of the excellent man's expression was some- 
thing to be remembered over many years. This particular 
simplicity very much amused the wicked little convent school- 
girls, who were so much more grown up than the nuns in 
many ways. 

Another thing that used to amuse us was the small organ 
which stood just outside the school oratory. It was very old 
and decrepit, and it had once been painted with a design 
of Pan playing upon his pipes. Some good nun had clad 
the goat-footed god in a scarlet mantle, had placed a crown 
of gold upon his head, had changed the Pan-pipes to a harp. 
She had dressed him in the garments of King David; but 
oh ! she had not changed his eyes or his expression. From 
his dark corner the goat-foot laughed at these innocencies. 

At the convent, man, unless he happened to be an ecclesi- 
astic, was put in his proper place. It would have delighted 
the suffragettes. At Christmas we had plays, and male 
costume was represented by a short petticoat, red for pref- 

[65] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

erence, and a jacket. You added a burnt-cork moustache. 
With a rose in your coat and a bit of swagger you might 
make-believe yourself a pretty fellow, and not unlikely ex- 
cite some thrills in school-girl breasts. The closer the im- 
personation was to the male sex the less the nuns liked it. 
I have known the rose in the coat to be rebuked, and the 
swagger to be sharply snubbed. Indeed in one case a some- 
what daring swagger caused the greatest distress to the 
Reverend Mother, and made a little scandal in the school. 

One does not grow old in the convent. Nuns are very 
often capable in worldly affairs quite beyond the ordinary. 
Every convent has its genius in the way of a business 
woman. Convent efficiency in the affairs of everyday life 
reaches a high standard. The convents are exquisitely 
clean. The nuns cook with a French daintiness. Their 
needlework is a dream. They make good nurses. There 
are many convents in Ireland where they do not sing the 
Divine Office; and one rather wonders how the nuns find 
occupation for their hours. Beyond the convent walls there 
are the cabins of the poor. The poor Irish house-mother 
cannot cook, cannot sew, cannot wash, cannot clean. She 
has not an idea of simple domestic remedies. She would 
accept teaching at the hands of the nuns as she would not 
at the hands of the laity. What a waste of energy, one 
thinks! What amelioration the nuns might bring to the 
cottagers' lot ! What a standard they might set up and lift 
the people to. Alas, the nuns are enclosed as they were in 
the Middle Ages, when enclosure was necessary, and the 
poor go untaught. We want a new Catherine of Siena, a 
new Teresa, to set the helper free to come to the aid of the 
one who needs help. 

Perhaps the things I have told give no idea of the serene 
peace which was the convent atmosphere. It fostered all 

[66] 



SCHOOL DAYS 

that was poetical in a child's mind. Of course I had my 
preferences among the nuns, but, as a whole, they were a 
galaxy of wonderful and beautiful creatures to me. The 
beauty, the myster}', the sanctity survive over my school 
years. If I laugh it is as one laughs at those one loves 
most dearly. 

We had our little passions, sometimes for a nun, some- 
times for each other. The nuns had a convention of dis- 
couraging these special adorations. I am sure they really 
delighted in them. Mine was a passion for an elder girl 
about to become a nun. She was going to the convent at 
Lisbon, which gave my passion the poignancy of impend- 
ing separation. She was a rosy-cheeked, dark-eyed girl, 
with burnished black hair, which at one temple showed a 
strand of white. As her departure was close at hand she 
was not exactly in the school life and she came and went a 
good deal, as she was preparing her convent trousseau. I 
used to cry a great deal at night because she was going away, 
and she used to come and comfort me. I knew her foot- 
step in the corridor and I used to feel faint with love when 
she came. Once, on a dark winter morning, washing in 
cold water as was our ascetic custom, and groping my way 
by candle-light, I was told she had come back the night 
before. At first I thought it was too good to be true and 
suspected a trick. When I was persuaded of its truth, what 
was it that turned the January morning to June and made 
the chilly dark rose-coloured and shining ? In the dark cor- 
ridor on the way to Mass, as we passed the warm kitchen, 
delightful on a cold winter morning, she came behind me 
and kissed me. Oh, rapture ! oh, delight ! oh, ecstasy ! Was 
there anything in more mature passions quite as good ? 

The passion was the victim of a mischance. In the sum- 
mer vacation the beloved asked, as I thought, an impossible 
thing. It was a blunder. Writing home and to me in the 

[67] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

same hour, she asked for a number of things to be sent her 
in a postscript added by mistake to my letter instead of 
to that to her mother. She never knew what accident had 
occurred till I presented her with something of what she 
had asked for. If I could have procured her the things she 
asked my passion might have survived. As it was, my 
anguish of helplessness was so great — I had striven to get 
her some of the things without letting anyone know that 
she had asked me, for I dreaded cold eyes on what I felt 
to be my late idol's imperfection — that it shook down my 
passion altogether. Even when I discovered the mistake 
it was too late to put it back in its place. She complained 
after the vacation that, whereas I used to cr}'' perpetually, 
I now laughed as perpetually. The passion was quite gone ; 
I do not believe I shed a tear the day she went. 

Other departures there were for the Lisbon convent. 
Some of the nuns who had been twenty or thirty years in 
the convent embarked on that perilous voyage like babes 
going out to sea. The Portuguese Government even then 
did not permit religious to enter its territory, in religious 
garments at all events. The nuns used to be very busy 
concocting such garments as nuns might wear without get- 
ting too far from a conventional garb. They had to wear 
little black close-fitting caps to conceal their cropped heads, 
and the silk hoods trimmed with lace were very pretty, but 
must have been sufficiently unlike other things then worn 
to attract the attention they wished to avoid. I think the 
nuns must have been very quaint figures indeed on the 
voyage. 

From the Lisbon convent came home delicious preserved 
fruits and sweet waters, which were distributed to us on 
feast-days. But my once-beloved came back no more. 

I had now entered upon the long period of indolence 
which marked my childhood and girlhood, so that the stigma 

[68] 



SCHOOL DAYS 

of laziness was affixed to me by industrious elders. At the 
convent I learnt only what came easy to me. I wept when I 
was asked to learn other things, and at the prize-giving I 
received a prize for General Improvement, which was 
equivalent to a booby prize. I had been sent to school with 
a charge against my eyes being overworked, which saved 
me from doing many things I did not like. I had only to 
cover my eyes with my hand and sigh, to be set free from 
work. Even my mending was done for me by unwilling 
school-fellows, and I fear that the lowering looks directed 
at me when some one had to mend my stockings instead 
of fancy-working, pleased my mischievous spirit not a little. 
Once retribution befell me, for the nuns got alarmed at 
the repetition of the hand over the eyes and all the rest of 
it. I spent three days in a darkened room, while people 
came in at intervals and asked tenderly after me as if I 
were dying. A poignant feature of the situation was that 
the music-room in which I was a prisoner contained quite 
a number of books. But I was in the dark, and the books 
were a Tantalus cup. On the fourth day my eyes were 
suddenly mysteriously well, and I never had a recurrence 
of the distressing symptoms. 

I left school at the mature age of fourteen. I could have 
gone back if I liked, but no one troubled to make me go. 
Before I left I signed the convent pledge, which had nothing 
to do with strong drink. I do not mean that I signed a 
document, but all the nuns' pupils were willing to under- 
take that in the perilous world they would not dance "fast 
dances" ; they would not go to a theatre ; they would not 
read novels. They did not ask a pledge against writing 
them. 

The nuns added a counsel which was surely mediaeval. It 
was that we should not look male creatures in the face when 
we encountered them. 

[69] 



CHAPTER VI 

THE GOOD YEARS 

I WAS reminded of how much water had flowed under the 
bridges since my school-days, when the other day I was 
present at a meeting of a girls' debating society attached 
to a Hostel run by nuns for the girl students of the National 
University. 

The paper was on Coventry Patmore. A number of 
ladies and a few priests were among the audience. The 
paper was read with the utmost aplomb. Even when the 
essayist lost her place and had to hunt for several minutes 
through the pages before she could proceed she was not at 
all embarrassed. On the conclusion of the paper the other 
girl students discussed it with great spirit. The discussion 
was mainly on Love, and Patmore's occasionally odd theo- 
ries of it. It was conducted with the fearlessness of inno- 
cence, and it was the most piquant thing to hear the fresh 
country girls discussing things which in my convent school- 
days would have made the nuns faint if they were even 
remotely alluded to. One of us said to the delightful nun 
who had us in charge : "They seem to know a deal about 
Love." "Ah sure, they don't," she said, her face twinkling; 
"they only think they do." 

Dear me! I thought of the paper pasted over the page 
of our history-books where a king's indiscretion, or it might 
be a queen's, was mentioned. How much ingenuity we de- 
voted to discovering what was on that printed page under 
the slip! I remembered the reading nun's blush and the 
excision in the plays. I remembered how at an earlier con- 
vent school still we sang: "Come where my Love lies 

[70] 



THE GOOD YEARS 

Dreaming," as "Come where my Child lies Dreaming," and 
I marvelled at the change which had come upon things. 

When the country was presented with the Intermediate 
Education, that evil gift which would seem to have been 
designed to make the Irish stupid as well as to make them 
money-grabbing, my nuns flatly refused to have anything 
to do with it. What ! send their young ladies into the rough- 
and-tumble of the Examination Halls, to get their names in 
the papers? Perish the thought! I heard afterwards that 
after all they had been dragged into the horrid thing much 
against their wills. I am quite sure they were not in it with 
the up-to-date establishments, which in the scramble for 
result fees sucked the pupils of brains and health as one 
might suck an orange, and left something as worthless often 
as the sucked orange behind. If Ireland of to-day is not 
stupid it says a deal for its recuperative powers. 

My poor nuns have had many things to bear since the 
gentle days of the seventies. Hard upon the Intermediate, 
or perhaps before It, there came the Land League. The noise 
of it from afar ofT troubled the convent, the more so when 
women took part in the turmoil, adding to it a good deal, 
as the sex is apt to do when it is among the combatants. 
Nuns are very conservative, even when they are patriotic — 
with a refined, high-minded patriotism which is quite com- 
patible with Unionist convictions. Fathers and mothers, 
uncles and cousins, to say nothing of the female relatives, 
might be in the rough and tumble, but the nuns were dis- 
turbed and disapproving. Small blame to them ! The Land 
League was not at all an inspiring movement. 

But all that is far ahead of the days when one left the 
convent school, fortified by those innocent pledges against 
the snares of the world. 

What of public interest stands out in those days for a 

[71] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

little girl in the early teens? I can remember the illness 
of the Prince of Wales, as he then was, and the hushed 
expectation which found its way even through the convent 
walls while the result was still in doubt. There was in 
those days something of the fascination about the Prince 
which King Edward had to the end for his Irish subjects. 
I suppose it was due to his being a good sportsman. 
It was certainly something the solid virtues would not have 
awakened. He was a more romantic figure in those days 
to little school girls in one Irish convent than he could have 
guessed at. 

I remember also what must have been an eclipse of the 
sun — a much more complete one than the much heralded 
eclipse of April, 19 12, which fizzled out in a light shadow 
and a cool wind. Of course we thought it was the end of 
the world. Indeed in those days we were always antici- 
pating the end of the world, because St. Columcille or some- 
one else had predicted it. I cannot recall that we made 
special preparations for it. 

I returned home from school to find the family living in 
the house, Whitehall, Clondalkin, Co. Dublin, which I have 
described before, and there I lived till my marriage. 

Those middle years of the seventies, before the wet sum- 
mers brought the potato-blight and the famine and the Land 
League in their train, were very quiet and good years. 
There were a number of good summers in which things pros- 
pered amazingly. The cattle-trade, in which my father was 
engaged, was then at its greatest prosperity. People thought 
that the bad times would never come again, basking in the 
sunshine of those fine summers and mild winters. 

Although my education had come to an end it was but 
beginning. For three or four years after I left the convent 
school I was endlessly idle and endlessly busy. I led as free 

[72] 



THE GOOD YEARS 

a life as was compatible with sleeping indoors. Alone, ex- 
cept for the company of a dog", I roamed the fields from 
morning till night. The one duty laid upon me was to fetch 
the letters, which had to be done by someone every day. The 
letters seldom arrived before late afternoon. I read the 
day's paper in the fields, and I called at neighbouring houses 
and borrowed their books and periodicals, which I also read 
in the fields. I don't remember that I ever thought of food. 
To be sure I ate sugar-stick and shared it with my Irish 
terrier, Snow, with whom also I shared the blackberries I 
picked from the hedgerows. I gathered all the wild harvests 
of the fields and hedgerows. I went blackberrying and 
mushrooming in the autumn. I picked and ate crab-apples 
and haws and sloes. Even the berries of the mountain ash 
I sampled; and once I ate the berries of the arbutus, but 
did not repeat the experiment. I knew all the mysteries of 
the fields. Every field had a friend's face for me, though 
I loved some better than others. I knew the loneliness of 
autumn fields, where only a grasshopper chirps or a late 
bird sings. The Spirit of Place in Ireland is very lonesome. 
Quite different is the Spirit of Place which whispers its 
stories at night in such a heart of England as the fields 
below the Malvern Plills. That Spirit of Place tells of lives 
flowing by to the great sea as easily as flow the rivers, of 
natural griefs and joys, of birth and death; there is no 
desolation of great wars in the pensive tale, nothing of up- 
rooting, of destruction. 

Whereas the Spirit of Place in Irish fields is the lone- 
somest thing you can imagine. It breathes of wars and 
famine and emigration. Someone is always going away — 

" 'Tis very lonesome in the quiet house 
Where nobody is ever coming home." 

[73] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

The Spirit of Place in Ireland is a banshee. She sits with 
her head bowed to her knees, the long veils of her hair 
swathing her, and she keens; very quietly she cries her cry 
of lamentation. There is only one sound of grief we miss 
in it ; that is bitter remorse for sin, for something done that 
can never be undone, no matter how one breaks one's heart; 
for the Spirit of Place in Ireland is desolate, but she is 
innocent. 

For years I roamed in those fields with my dog and I 
was never molested in any way. No one was ever rude to 
me or frightened me. Prudent ladies used to remonstrate 
with my father upon my hours of absence from the parental 
roof-tree. A Martha of an elder sister whom my later years 
revealed as very dear and kind used to grieve over what 
she called my idleness. As it had been at school so now 
at home it was conceded to me that I was beyond all com- 
parison quite the laziest and most worthless little girl in the 
experience of my elders. I went my way immovably, and 
my father, the one person whose authority I respected, said 
once again "let her be," and was wisely sure of the safety of 
the fields. 

Of course I read, and re-read all I could beg, borrow, or 
steal, always excepting the Family Bible. At the back of 
the orchard was a tall row of elm-trees. Their feet were set 
in a double hedge a-top of a high bank. The double hedge 
made the most delightful reading-place imaginable. My 
diligent sister did not know the mysteries of the fields as 
I knew them, and did not discover me in the double hedge. 
Perhaps she may have suspected my presence there, but 
she was little likely to follow me, as the hedge was over- 
grown with briars and thorns. Part of my general feckless- 
ness was that I did not care if I went ragged. Anyhow 
there I lay perdu, with my novel, while at intervals my sister 

[74] 



THE GOOD YEARS 

called, till the moon swung up between the orchard boughs 
and the light grew dim for reading, when I would go in- 
doors. She must have known I was somewhere about, else 
she would not have called. I remember times when the 
futility of her calling would oppress her suddenly even to 
tears. I never lifted my head when she went off sobbing. 
I was too absorbed in making up for the starved years whea 
I only read by stealth and had my novel confiscated if it 
were discovered, to be affected by an elder sister's tears. 

My poor dear sister had addressed herself to the hope- 
less task of making a housewife of me. She herself was 
one of those who delight in work for work's sake, but the 
happiness was not sufficient unless others were working too. 
She used to perform prodigies in the way of "making up" 
fine things, her own or someone else's, and, as she was not 
very strong, these excursions usually ended in a faint a-top 
of a hot iron. She used to make cakes with a prodigious 
expenditure of eggs and butter. "For the dint of the rich- 
ness," as our old cook used to say, the cakes never would 
hold together, but crumbled at a touch. The crumbs were 
very delicious, I am bound to say. 

She performed prodigies of doing, always with the maxi- 
mum of discomfort to the idle. When she was in a whirl- 
wind of doing it was an unpardonable offence for anyone 
else to sit down or even to lean against a wall or stand on 
one foot. There was a Christmas when she not only made 
the Christmas pudding but insisted on sitting up to see it 
boiled. The pudding was of such huge dimensions that 
there was only one pot capable of holding it. That pot 
was cracked. The old cook retired to bed at midnight with 
the caustic remark that there was no use in everybody's 
being worn out for Christmas Day, adding that the pud- 
ding might as well have been boiled by daylight, which was 

[75] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

quite true. My sister was contemptuous of these unsports- 
manlike remarks. To her a feast was not a feast unless 
it was kept strenuously. All that Christmas Eve night my 
sister watched the pot a-boiling, while two worn-out little 
girls dozed in their hard chairs. Dozed uneasily too, for 
the last warning of the cook had been as to the probability 
of the pot bursting and as like as not killing everyone of 
us with the splinters of iron, let alone the danger of our 
being scalded to death. For hours the pot threatened ex- 
plosion, waking us from our uneasy slumbers. About five 
o'clock the pudding was considered safe, and there was 
only to push the pot a little to one side. My sister's be- 
haviour to us was what that of the Wise Virgins might 
have been to the Foolish with their lamps out. She was 
quite cheerful, and she pitied us as we groped our way to 
bed. She had suggested going to six o'clock Mass, but that 
was quite beyond us. 

One of her ambitions was to make me a competent bed- 
maker. I suppose it must have been on wet days that she 
captured me for this purpose. I used to begin immediately 
after breakfast to make my own bed. It was a feather- 
bed, and it required a good deal of thumping before it 
satisfied my artistic conscience. Beside my bed was a 
window hung with the most delightful curtains. They 
were French, of a material called challis; I do not know 
if it is made now. It was a soft woolen texture, ivory 
coloured, and covered with a profusion of roses — lovely fat 
roses of all the shades between palest pink and deepest crim- 
son, flung together in a delicious madness. The curtain 
was held up by a band of ribbon. Where it was looped there 
was room for a book to hide. 

Well, as I have said, I began thumping my bed about nine 
o'clock in the morning. The curtain always held a book. 

[76] 



THE GOOD YEARS 

My sister, who had swept all else readable out of the room 
before she left me, was satisfied that I had no reading-matter 
available. From time to time she dropped in to see how 
I was getting on. She always found me thumping in ex- 
actly the same spot. She would rush round the room in 
a whirlwind searching for the contraband. She never dis- 
covered its hiding-place. I believe I was grown to woman's 
estate and she was married before I revealed to her the 
secret of my amazing dilatoriness over that bed-making. 

Doubtless if I had lived among writing-people I too 
should have written in those years. It did not occur to me 
to write, although I read much poetry. I still delighted in 
Longfellow; and I had Mrs. Browning, or a great part of 
her, by heart. Everyone read Tennyson in those days, but 
it was not until some years later that I possessed a Tennyson 
of my own. I had not yet begun to form a bookshelf, and 
I read from the books which were common property. 

I used to work myself up into an ecstasy as I walked the 
country roads repeating poetry to myself. When I grew 
excited I shouted it, and ran for sheer delight. I used to 
think myself unobserved, till I discovered some round-eyed 
boy sitting in a ditch tending cattle, and observing me with 
amazement. I daresay I had the reputation of being mad 
in those days. 

That was the time when the close and tender friendship 
between my father and myself made roots and grew. He 
loved society, and his going to live in the country had cut 
him ofif from many of his old friends and amusements. 
There had been a time when he played Unlimited Loo every 
Wednesday for ten or eleven months of the year. He was 
a great theatre-goer too, and could tell you tales of the great 
plays and players for thirty years back. 

He still clung to the theatre, and perhaps a couple of 

177] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

nights a week he and I went together. We used to drive to 
DubUn in his little pony-trap, put up our steed at a livery- 
stable, spend the evening at the theatre, and get out just 
in time to enjoy the oyster supper which he dearly loved. 
We used to arrive home in the small hours, when everyone 
else was gone to bed. 

He could not endure to go without my companionship. 
If I kept my bed with a cold he would rout me out, assuring 
me that the winter drive would do me nothing but good; 
and I am sure he was right. I remember sitting through 
the play with watering eyes and an inflamed nose, and mak- 
ing another expedition next day to the Turkish baths for 
a cure. Dublin was ever a great place for Turkish baths, 
and claims to be the place where they were first introduced. 
The Turkish bath was followed by the usual oyster supper, 
and home; and I cannot remember that I was the worse for 
the drive home in the open air. 

He certainly shielded me tenderly from the weather, for 
I was clad in sealskin. My sisters bought their own dresses, 
or my elder sister bought for the younger ones. It was not 
half so delightful as my father's taking me into one of the 
best shops Dublin afforded and fitting me out with a seal- 
skin coat which cost twenty-five pounds then, and would 
cost at least fifty now — and a Gainsborough hat ; it was the 
year the Gainsborough Duchess was stolen, about 1877, I 
think. I believe my elder sisters had their sealskins before 
I had mine; but I am sure theirs were purchased after a 
much duller fashion. 

Those must have been the good years when it was so 
easy to make money. Then came the couple of dreadful 
summers before the Land League. My father had con- 
tracted with the Government for the supply of cattle to the 
army, and he lost money. He had taken on more than any 

[78] 



THE GOOD YEARS 

one man could accomplish, and I don't think he had any- 
one helping him who cared very much for his interests. One 
year he had the army contracts of Ireland and England — 
Aldershot, Portsmouth, Chatham, the Curragh, and Dub- 
lin. He lived in the trains, travelling up and down to fairs 
and markets, buying cattle. Everything was against him. 

In those days the old happy companionship was at an 
end for the time being. He was worn out with incessant 
travelling — although he managed to sleep in the trains as 
in his bed — and disheartened by the knowledge that he was 
playing a losing game. There were times and seasons when 
I and an elder sister — not the elder sister — kept house to- 
gether with only the one old servant. The younger chil- 
dren were at school, the elder married or away. It was a 
time of extraordinary quietness, for we had very few 
visitors, and my father came home perhaps once in a week. 

We read — how we read ! By this time I was growing 
up — seventeen or thereabouts. I had discovered a treasure 
of a library, the library belonging to the old Mechanics' 
Institute in Dublin. It had shelves of bound magazines — 
magazines that were magazines, and none of your modern 
commonesses. Cornhill of the great days, and Frazer's, 
St. Paul's with the early poems of Meredith and other 
treasures in its pages. Belgravia, with all the tales of Miss 
Braddon running through it, and dear, delightful Temple 
Bar. A novel would have been exhausted in an evening. 
Not so the splendid magazine volumes. There was an ac- 
commodating librarian who let me roam the shelves at will 
and take away all I could carry. I was so greedy of carry- 
ing, indeed, that my arm sometimes shook for days after 
my book-getting expeditions because of the weight. There 
were treasures on those shelves, unsuspected treasures. I 
knew that the early Ruskins were valuable even then. Prob- 

[79] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

ably there were many other things sought for by the col- 
lector. I am glad to say that my honesty stood the test. 

One would think the house had been rather eerie, with 
only a couple of girls in their teens and an old woman, but 
though we were solitary we were never eerie. We sat over 
a big fire into the small hours, reading and sipping weak 
lemonade. We got up at any hour that pleased us, and I 
don't think we troubled much about meals. Tea was so 
much better than anything more troublesome to prepare. 
Only when my father was at home did we have regular 
meals, so far as regarded ourselves. We were at that age 
when meat is detestable to girls ; or perhaps there is no such 
age. Perhaps it was the incessant reading, the tea-meals, 
the never going abroad for exercise, that made us loathe 
meat. 

The time came when one woke up to neuralgia, had 
neuralgia for close companion all day, when one read with 
a throbbing head and aching eyes, and wept with sheer 
despair that pain could be so persistent, through the dark 
hours of the night. 

Neuralgia was an extremely common complaint among 
girls then. I imagine that most of our contemporaries 
shared our overweening preference for the tea breakfast, 
lunch, and dinner. The Irish Celt had not begun to eat nor 
learnt to cook. The Anglo-Irish sometimes rivalled the 
English in their excessive meat-eating. At that time, and 
perhaps even yet, it was a cause of spiritual pride with the 
Irish Celt that he was not even as the gluttonous Saxon. 



[80] 



CHAPTER VII 

THE LAND LEAGUE 

Somewhere about 1878 I wrote my first poem. Doubtless 
I should have made many essays long before that date — my 
own little daughter was writing poems at seven years old — 
if I had been brought up in a literary atmosphere. That 
I was not doubtless was to my benefit, for my critical faculty 
had more time to grow. I had plenty of poor and weak in- 
fluences to shed. If I had written earlier I should not per- 
haps have begun to discover that they were poor and weak. 

Poetry — of the minor order ; I knew very little else — had 
affected me from an early age. I can't imagine what stage 
of babyhood I was at when some verses, called "The 
Gambler's Wife," read aloud, woke me up in my bed, and 
sent me asleep, my pillow saturated with tears. Since that 
€arly date a good deal of water had flowed under the bridges. 
I had been reading, but I had not written. 

I may as well confess now that my first impulse towards 
authorship was because of a slight. Someone had been pre- 
ferred before me, and I wanted to show that I was that 
other one's superior. In Celtic Ireland, although they may 
not buy books, there is always a certain respect for literary 
achievement. 

That bit of fluent verse, not worth reprinting here, ap- 
peared in a Dublin penny paper, and I was proud of it, and 
so was my father. A little later I had several poems in the 
Graphic, of which Mr. Arthur Locker was then editor. I 
was paid half a guinea each for these. My father was so 
pleased that he wanted to frame my first cheque. Perhaps 
he did not offer me the equivalent, which would have been 

[81] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

very unlike him. Anyhow, the cheque was not framed. 
Another elder sister drove it in upon me — I was always 
receptive — that it was my duty to buy wearing apparel with 
it. I did buy the material for a dress, and very shoddy stuff 
it was, not worth the cost of making up. 

The next cheque I received I turned a deaf ear to prac- 
tical suggestions. I went straight off to Hodges & Figgis, 
the Grafton Street booksellers, and bought Rossetti's Poems. 
I can remember the joy with which I carried it home, hug- 
ging it to my breast like a baby. I believe it was the first 
book, which was a book, that I possessed of my very own. 

Since writing this I have looked up the Poems, and find 
that it could not have been the next cheque by any means 
that bought them, for they bear the date April 14, 1885. 
In the September of the same year my father gave me 
Ballads and Sonnets; but by that time I was an author my- 
self, my first book, Louise de la Valliere, having been pub- 
lished in the summer of 1885. I never saw Rossetti's Poems 
before 1884, when I was visiting in England, and as most 
of the poems gathered into Louise de la Valliere were writ- 
ten in the early eighties, the influence from Rossetti which 
the reviewers found in the little book must have travelled to 
me somehow on the air. Perhaps there is more of a real 
influence from him in later verses. I certainly did write 
some very Rossettian verses after I had read him, but I don't 
think they got into print. 

However, all that is far away from the last of the seven- 
ties and the early eighties. My wildest imaginations did 
not then run so far ahead as a book. Mr. Locker was my 
first English friend, and not so long after the Spectator 
printed a sonnet, the very first thing I sent there. That 
was in Mr. Hutton's time. I suppose I must have written 
a good deal of poetry that did not get published. I cer- 

[82] 



THE LAND LEAGUE 

tainly remember writing poems during those midnight 
seances while I was racked with neuralgia. 

However, some time following the eighties I was taken 
up with a new interest in the shape of active politics. At 
least they became active after the arrest of the Irish leaders 
towards the end of 1881, with the formation of the Ladies' 
Land League. I may as well confess that the Land League 
in itself did not greatly interest me. Nor did it interest my 
father, who belonged to the old '48 party, and was more 
in sympathy with Isaac Butt's movement than with any- 
thing agrarian. To be sure he owned his land for the 
greater part, and so the shoe did not pinch him as it pinched 
the tenant-farmers. But I think, in any case, the movement 
would not have attracted him, nor did it attract me, in itself. 
It brought for the first time a certain Americanism into Irish 
politics which was altogether opposed to sentiment and ro- 
mance, unless one finds romantic the enormous sums poured 
week by week from Irish America into the Land League 
coffers; and that, I think, belonged more to the realm of 
the fairy-story than to anything of actual life. 

The romantic force that did attract one, beyond an agita- 
tion which had largely a material aspect, was the personality 
of the leaders. In 1874 Mr, Parnell had made his first ap- 
pearance in Irish public life when he contested County Dub- 
lin as a Home Ruler. In Mr. Barry O'Brien's Life of 
Parnell you will read about the impression he created. 
Handsome, refined, distinguished, he was painfully shy, and 
broke down after a single sentence in his first speech. None 
of the experienced politicians who listened to him saw any- 
thing in him but a gentle, well-mannered young man. No 
one imagined his greatness or forecasted his fortune, ex- 
cept perhaps the car-driver who drove him from Rathdrum 
station to Avondale, after the declaration of the poll which 

[83] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

left him a badly defeated candidate. "That's a regular 
devil," he said. "He talked about nothing all the way from 
the station but fighting again and smashing them all, and 
he looked wild and fierce." 

I can remember a day in 1874 when Mr. A. M. Sullivan, 
for whom my father had a great admiration and respect, 
and who was occasionally our honoured guest, told us about 
that appearance of Mr. Parnell's, I was quite a Httle girl 
then, but I think an intelligent one. We must have been 
sitting about the fire in the dining-room of my old home, 
where afterwards many politicians and interesting people 
of all sorts were to sit, for I remember the cold glimmer of 
a white marble mantelpiece while A. M., as we called him, 
talked of the gentle brown eyes of the young Wicklow 
squire, and his shyness in face of a crowd. 

And that brings to me another reminiscence in what must 
be a very discursive narrative. It is again A. M. Sullivan, 
and the year is 1880, the year of the great Tory debacle. 
He is telling of Lord Beaconsfield's remark when he realised 
the ruin of his party. It is not, "This year I shall see the 
roses blow at Hughenden" ; but, "There has been nothing 
like it since Overend and Gurney," referring to the great 
bank smash of some years earlier. 

Mr. Parnell's was a romantic personality, and so was 
Michael Davitt's. There were a number of interesting per- 
sonalities among the younger men. One was able to see 
them more clearly because at the time there was no towering 
personality. We did not yet know what Mr. Parnell was. 
And that brings me to the thought of how he was, and is, 
and shall be Mr. Parnell. There are certain men to whom 
the "Mr." belongs — Mr. Pitt, Mr. Fox, Mr. Disraeli, Mr. 
Gladstone, Mr. Parnell. The "Mr." in these cases is prouder 
than any title. Occasionally you will hear a former col- 

[84] 



THE LAND LEAGUE 

league of Mr. Parnell's refer to him as "Parnell" — even as 
"poor Parnell." At which one is repelled, as though by an 
irreverence. 

Michael Davitt had urged the formation of the Ladies' 
Land League, foreseeing the time when the men would be 
in prison and there would be need for someone to look after 
the evicted tenants. I was present at the first meeting, when 
Mr. Davitt and Mr. Andrew Kettle saw us started. I stood 
and talked with them afterwards by the fire. It was on a 
later Sunday that we met in an upper room of the Land 
League Offices at 39 Upper Sackville Street. I cannot re- 
member that any men were present, nor indeed anything 
of the proceedings, except an inflammatory speech from a 
woman organiser, which rather frightened some of us who 
were not extremists. 

I believe Mr. Parnell disliked the women's organisation 
from the beginning, as he certainly detested it in the end. 
It was carried forward by the compelling force of the sister 
who in every way so strongly resembled him, who had his 
mystery, his strangeness, his aloofness, his extraordinary 
charm in great measure. 

I cannot remember Miss Anna Parnell at those early meet- 
ings, which have a somewhat dull, somewhat crude feeling 
in my memory of them. I think if she had been there she 
must have illumined them. I remember so strongly the ex- 
traordinarily compelling force of her personality, so that 
later on, when the Ladies' Land League was in full work — 
everyone as busy as bees — one always knew, without 
seeing or hearing her, when she had entered the room. 
Crowds of people, mostly interesting for one reason or an- 
other, came to those offices. You might not lift your eyes 
from your letter-writing for Members of Parliament, coun- 
try priests, released suspects, American journalists, revolu- 

[85] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

tionary leaders, but you would certainly lift them and turn 
about when the little lady, whose very atmosphere was quiet- 
ness, glided gently into her place. 

I had been leading a singularly dull life for some years 
previous to the Ladies' Land League. My little poems had 
as yet brought me no friends — excepting always my father. 
Two or three intellectuals, or men of taste, whom his per- 
sonality had attracted, were pleasantly interested in my be- 
ginnings. But they moved in other orbits than mine. 
Others, farmers like himself, yet very unlike, whose children 
did not write poetry, suggested to him that he should dis- 
courage me. "Make her mend the stockings," said one; 
and some twenty years later, when I had discovered writing 
as a profession and a paying one, an Irish Dominican father 
found the same formula for my case. 

These people were confuted when even the half-guineas 
and guineas for a poem began to come in. But those were 
early days; and suggestions were even made to my father 
that these literary pursuits might endanger my prospects 
of making a good marriage. 

To be sure he did not listen to them. From the first he 
was inordinately proud and pleased at any little success I 
made, just as when I was a child the writing of an "essay," 
as I called it, mostly cribbed, I imagine, from my miscella- 
neous reading, would make him well-disposed to all the 
world, and prepared to grant some request on my own be- 
half or on behalf of the others. 

But so far my writing had not very much affected my life. 
It was too small in volume and too desultory. We were 
leading the lonesome life I have tried to depict in an earlier 
chapter. It was a great change for me to be a member 
of the Ladies' Land League, and to spend three or four days 
of the week at the League offices. If I had not the cause 

[86] 




Bee Walshe 




Margaret Walshe 



THE LAND LEAGUE 

very much at heart, at least I had enough inspiration from 
the leaders to keep me going. 

I do not know who was responsible for the alliterative 
title. If it was Miss Parnell, it was a part of the simplicity 
which marked both her and Mr. Parnell. Perhaps she al- 
lowed someone else to make the title for her. Perhaps it 
was Michael Davitt's choice. At one of the first meetings 
I said: "Why not Women's Land League?" and was told 
that I was too democratic. 

It was such a title as gives the scofifer his opportunity, 
and no doubt he took it. But, looking back and recalling 
the big room with its desks and tables, I see a group of 
singularly interesting women. Of course there were a num- 
ber of rustics, but these were of the rank and file, the ones 
who wrote dictated letters; it was not yet the day of the 
typewriter. Miss Parnell, having the elements of greatness, 
had attracted to her a group of women and girls who fitted 
easily into her entourage. Ireland is the place for the un- 
expected. Few fashionable gatherings could furnish forth 
such a group of faces as I remember — not merely pretty, 
but faces with soul and intelligence bright in them. There 
was a group of girls, cousins. I recall a small ivory-pale 
face amid sweeping masses of autumn-leaf hair, the lifted 
eyes full of poetry — Bee Walshe. In her brother's house 
at Balla, County Mayo, the Land League was born. There 
was a beautiful dark face, the face of a Muse — her sister, 
Margaret. There was her cousin May Nally, a little 
piquant French face. Constantly one sees those French 
faces in Ireland. She reproduced exactly the face of one 
of the actresses of the Comedie Frangaise. Which ? I can- 
not remember. Not Re jane, not Jeanne Granier. Who 
was the other great person with Sarah Bernhardt thirty 
years ago? I cannot remember. 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I dare not say that this family group of girls — there were 
others, younger sisters, younger cousins, all beautiful and 
young — I dare not say it was typical. That would be too 
much. But I think there are many family groups as re- 
markable to be found in Ireland. 

I never visited, as I might have done, the Walshes' home 
at Balla, but I can reconstruct the life there as it had been 
with all those beautiful girls growing up — romantic, high- 
minded, full of poetry and ideals. They had lived amid the 
making of history, their own men, and the men who were 
their friends and lovers, already engaged in the making. 
It had been an idyllic life there in many ways. I remember 
one of the girls bursting into tears one day because some 
one sang the Kerry Dance, reminding her of the old days. 
They had a singular refinement, even elegance. I cannot 
imagine that the hard times had pinched them very severely. 
If they had known poverty, it had left no dreary traces 
upon them. 

The one I knew best. Bee Walshe, was steeped to the lips 
in an ideal patriotism, which had very little to do with a 
movement a servir, such as the Land League was. She had 
read much poetry. I can remember her, in the dusk, read- 
ing English ballad-poetry to me with an ecstasy which for- 
got the flight of time. She was very religious, yet she had 
endured what was to happen to many Parnellite women 
later — the denunciations of the priests. The old parish 
priests, at least, Conservatives at heart and friends with the 
gentry, being men who had received a continental educa- 
tion and naturally gravitated towards the gentlefolk, were 
as bitter in denunciation of the Land League at the start 
as later priests v/ere of Parnellism. It was some time be- 
fore the priests were compelled to come into line, or to seem 
to acquiesce if they did not. At that time the difference 

[88] 



THE LAND LEAGUE 

between the priest who had been educated abroad and the 
Maynooth priest was very marked. There has been very 
much more of a levelHng up in our own days. 

In the Ladies' Land League I found a whole new world 
of interests. For one thing, I found there my first real 
touch with literature. There was another group of sisters 
as remarkable in their way as the Walshes and Nallys. In 
their house I really entered the literary atmosphere. One 
of them was Hannah Lynch, whose novels appealed to the 
discriminating. She was one of the few people I have 
known who eat, drink and dream books, and not many can 
have given to literature a more passionate delight and de- 
votion. They were all literary in so far as a devotion to 
literature goes ; and the well-packed bookcases of the house 
filled with the great things were a wonder-world to me after 
my miscellaneous and very odd reading. 

These sisters, with their mother, were quite at home amid 
the alarms and excursions of the Land League. Their 
father had been a Fenian, one of those useful ones who 
stood a little outside the danger zone, so to speak, and were 
in the counsels and confidence of the leaders. John O'Leary 
used to say of the Fenians : "We are not a transacting 
party." Still, a party, even of Fenians, must transact some- 
times ; and there are men still living in Dublin who, I think, 
were the safe depositories of Fenian transactions, and were 
free to transact, standing just outside the fighting line. 
This may or may not have been true of the father of my 
early friends. I do not remember that in their conversa- 
tions they ever spoke of him as having been imprisoned; 
but he may have been. It was a commonplace at the time. 

These girls grew up among the writers, thinkers, orators, 
politicians, conspirators of their day. The names that 
dropped from their tongues with an easy intimacy opened the 

[89] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

doors of a wonder-world for me. They had grown up in 
the midst of affairs. Not only the men of the Irish move- 
ments were familiar to them from babyhood, but men of 
another reputation. Edmond O'Donovan, who had not so 
long before ridden to Merv, had grown up with them like 
a brother. They knew the whole brilliant Irish group of 
war-correspondents of those days. One feels now that there 
must have been a certain Parisian atmosphere in the Dub- 
lin of that time, so brilliant was its Bohemia. In Dublin 
the Vie de Boheme was quite in its place. In Fleet Street 
it could never have been so much at home, although John 
Augustus O'Shea and other Irish journalists kept the tra- 
ditions of it there. One has to go back to the Elizabethans 
for the English Vie de Boheme. But in our own day, and 
an earlier one, the influence of the ever-growing and ex- 
panding middle-class has made the Bohemian spirit out- 
cast even from Fleet Street, into which frock-coated, top- 
hatted respectability has overflowed from the City. 

This family opened to me its hospitable doors. I learnt 
much from them. The mother was a woman of spirit and 
cleverness. She was very bookish, full of personality, and 
a perfect mine of stories about the men of the forty-eight, 
of the fifties and sixties. She used to drop words of wisdom 
into my receptive ears. From her I heard for the first time 
of the magnificences of the Old Testament in the Authorised 
Version. I heard from her that the translation was made 
by some great group of poets and scholars, whose names 
are unknown to us ; that Shakespeare might have had a hand 
in it; that we Catholics were at a sad loss in not having 
been nourished on those Noble Numbers. She pointed out 
to me how much the great English writers derived from the 
Bible. All trite and commonplace, perhaps, to people con- 
cerned with literature; but to me it was a light. Not that 

[90] 



THE LAND LEAGUE 

it set me to reading the Bible; that was reserved for my 
maturer years. I beHeve I made one or two excursions into 
the Family Bible about this period, and was driven back 
by the terrible plain-speaking I chanced upon. 

Somehow or somewhere — perhaps from my mother, per- 
haps from the convent school — I had derived more than a 
streak of Puritanism about my reading. My new friends 
had a catholic taste in reading. They were musicians, and 
they had languages. They had seen, were seeing a world far 
beyond my ken, for they had all gone to convent schools 
abroad, and after their schooldays they had gone to Spain 
and Austria and France and Italy as English governesses 
to the children of noble families. The noble families had 
treated their governesses with the most tender courtesy. 
Proud names — the Princess of this, the Marquis of that — 
prouder still even, came in the course of ordinary conver- 
sation. Imagine an inexperienced person like myself listen- 
ing to sad tales or otherwise about lives or deaths of kings, 
from one who had actually spoken with a king. It was 
certainly bewildering and delightful. 

Of the books I was introduced to by these early friends 
two or three stand out. Two were the Anatomy of Melan- 
choly and the Religio Medici. I envied them reading 
George Sand in the French as easily as I could in the 
English. I had just enough French dimly to apprehend 
something I thought evil in a book by Michelet — La Fcmme, 
was it ? I had taken it to bed with me one night, and com- 
ing upon a passage I did not like I got up very quietly, 
opened the door gently, and deposited the book in the 
passage. I had an idea that there was not room for my 
angel and Michelet in the little chamber where I slept. I 
told my hosts the next day, and I remember how they 
laughed at me. 

[91] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

In that same little narrow room in the kind hospitable 
house over against the Jesuits' Church in Upper Gardiner 
Street, Dublin, I lay the night before the execution of Myles 
Joyce for a murder of which the popular opinion of the 
day acquitted him, and heard in the darkness the short 
strokes of a spade all night as though someone dug a grave. 
It was not likely that anyone should be digging all night in 
Upper Gardiner Street, Dublin. But there it was all the 
same. 

In the daytime at the League offices I was of those 
who addressed envelopes and wrote letters. After the "No 
Rent Manifesto" had been issued, grants were made to 
evicted tenants. I think they were sometimes allowed to 
pay and not be evicted if they paid "at the point of the 
bayonet" — that was the phrase : the Irish love a military 
phrase. In saying this I am ready to be corrected. I was 
only one of the rank and file, and a frivolous one. After 
thirty years my memory is not very sure. 

I was present that winter at the trial of the men who 
were accused of murdering the Huddys, Lord Ardilaun's 
bailiffs, who were found in Lough Corrib, tied up in sacks. 
An Irish Judge has told me since that the elder Huddy was 
the bailiff. He was afraid of delivering his notices to quit 
to the wild people and took his young grandson of twelve 
with him to soften their hearts. Both were murdered. An 
anonymous letter came to the police telling the exact spot 
where the bodies would be found. He described for me 
the strange wildness of the scene when the police-boats 
went out at night dragging the Lough for the dead bodies. 
We went to the trial. I wonder now how I endured it. 
For some reason or other while we waited we were put in 
the waiting-room with the wives and families of the ac- 
cused men, Irish-speaking peasants of the Western sea- 

[92] 



THE LAND LEAGUE 

board — dark, tragic, handsome, the whole sorrow of the 
world in their desolate faces. 

I don't think anyone wanted to be juryman in those wild 
times, more especially when the outrages began in Dub- 
lin — the work of the Invincibles. So well was the secret of 
the Invincibles kept that at that time no one suspected 
the existence of a secret society in Dublin — other than the 
Fenianism which was always going on. But Fenianism was 
a high-minded, clean-handed Quixotism, very unlike the 
conspiracy hatched by James Carey. Indeed, the Fenians 
more than looked askance at the Land League. They looked 
on it as a demoralising, debasing agitation ; and doubtless 
in many ways it did not make for high-mindedness. I can- 
not imagine that Mr. Parnell was ever much in love with 
it, except as a weapon to his hand — the matter that must 
be settled before the country could set out on a higher ad- 
venture. No one, at least no one I knew at the time, sus- 
pected the Invincibles. Indeed, I had been assured by those 
who ought to know — it was a commonplace of the time — 
that the Land League had killed the secret societies, the 
evil having come to the surface healthily. Therefore when 
the outrages began in Dublin, when a man was murdered 
under the railway arch in Seville Place, when there was 
another murder or attempted murder at the corner of Abbey 
Street at the busiest hour of the winter afternoon, when 
Mr. Field, a juryman, was stabbed as he went home to his 
house in North Frederick Street, peaceful citizens might 
well begin to be afraid. There was a horrible series of 
murders and hangings in that first year of the eighties. 
There were many winter mornings when one awoke to the 
horrible thought that there was a hanging at Kilmainham 
Jail. Once I had the misfortune on the night before a hang- 
ing to sleep at a friend's house, and being insufficiently pro- 

[93] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

vided with bed-clothes, the night being cold as it seldom 
is in Ireland, to lie awake all night shivering before the 
thought of the dawn and the condemned wretch in his cell. 

I saw more than one murder trial in Green Street. I 
suppose it was the psychology of the crowd that carried me 
thither and kept me there. I remember those Irish-speaking 
prisoners who stood in the dock, their arms outstretched in 
the form of a cross, while the sentence was passed in a 
tongue of which they did not understand a word, after a 
trial in the same strange speech. 

Once I met my father on the stairs of Green Street Court- 
house. He had escaped serving as a juryman by urging a 
conscientious objection to hanging. "It seems to me, my 
Lord," he said, "that you could not make a worse use of 
a m.an than to hang him." He was triumphant as he went 
down the stairs. Another time he was not so fortunate. 
Someone was being tried for murder and he was on the jury. 
The conscientious man's mind was unsettled in those days 
by the rumours that flew about of the innocence of prisoners 
who seemed to have so little chance for their lives, seeing 
that they did not know the evidence against them nor when 
the sentence of death was pronounced except by the judge's 
black cap. On this second occasion the trial fell through 
because of the disinclination of a humane Conservative to 
hang a man, which was so violent that he fell in a dead 
faint. There was a new jury to try the case, on which my 
father was not empanelled. 

How glad I was on that first occasion to see him going 
out to his little pony and trap from the courthouse, back 
to his country life and pursuits. I was dreadfully afraid of 
danger for him : and he had nothing to do with the air of 
the shambles which rested upon Green Street at the time. 

The Land League in those days was the expression of the 

[94] 



THE LAND LEAGUE 

Nationalist spirit in Ireland. I think a good many of us 
felt the uninspiringness of it, but there it was! And there 
was always Mr. Parnell and the other leaders to inspire 
us. Had not Mr. Parnell said in one of his public speeches 
that if it was only the land he would never have taken off 
his coat for this. I imagine a good many people besides my 
father and myself looked beyond the Land League to that 
for which Mr. Parnell had taken off his coat. 



[95] 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE TROUBLED TIMES 

Talking of our presence at those murder trials it sounds 
as though we were a pack of tricoteuses, which shows the 
difficulty of getting inside the lives and environments of 
others. 

As a matter of fact there were no furies in the Ladies' 
Land League. I am reminded of a very young Jesuit who 
once said with an alluring stutter, "We're supposed to be 
very d — d — dreadful fellows, but I assure you we're only 
a h — h — harmless pack of b — b — blithering idiots." 

The psychology of the crowd might carry us to be present 
at murder trials. Within the League offices we were a harm- 
less pack of very harmless girls and women. I fancy the 
compliments we sometimes received on our heroism must 
have been embarrassing to us. Certainly Miss Parnell was 
of the stuff of which heroines are made : perhaps she alone 
of us. And what soft, gentle stuff it was ! This indomita- 
ble little woman used to come into the offices of a morning 
with gifts of cakes and sweets — sometimes delicately per- 
fumed soap, Eau-de-Cologne; something or other which 
had caught her attention as she passed the shops as being 
calculated to please the feminine mind. 

She used to distribute her gifts with a shy beneficence, 
putting something down quickly on the table and turning 
away. She apparently found nothing amiss with her help- 
ers. She had a generous, innocent delight in their good 
looks when they possessed them, and was quick to discover 
beauty where perhaps no one else would have found it. 

One would have said she was masculine if she had not 

[96] 



THE TROUBLED TIMES 

been so feminine. The small pale face, strangely attractive, 
was very sensitive, somewhat nervous. Varying expressions 
flitted over it, troubling it a second before passing. Her 
hair was very soft and fine, a sure index to a sensitive na- 
ture. She had something of Mr. Parnell's charming voice : 
I use the adjective in its particular application : and she had 
his refined, deliberate pronunciation. 

I remember one winter morning, the streets full of a 
frosty mist, when I was at the League early, so I must have 
stayed with my friends overnight. We always kept roaring 
fires at the offices, and it was pleasant to come into the 
rooms from the street. In came Miss Parnell. She used to 
walk down from Hume Street every morning. She lived 
then at No. 7 Hume Street. She came in with her curi- 
ously gentle, gliding pace, in her neat dress, the very em- 
bodiment, one would have said, of a delicate austere lady 
just verging on spinsterhood. 

We hardly looked up as she came in. She did not ex- 
pect much notice to be taken of her. 

On this occasion she spoke very quietly, but there was 
a subdued excitement in her face and manner. 

"I met Lord Spencer in Westmoreland Street," she said. 
"He was riding with his escort. I went out into the road- 
way and stopped his horse. 'What do you mean, Lord 
Spencer,' I said, 'by interfering with the houses I am build- 
ing for evicted tenants?' He only stared at me and mut- 
tered something, lifting his hat. I held his horse by the 
head-piece till he heard me. Then I went back to the 
pavement." 

We were thunderstruck at the danger she had run. One 
who could speak very freely to her said : "But, Miss 
Parnell, they might have cut you down! Their duty was 
to protect Lord Spencer. It was a mad thing to do." 

[97] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

"I had to tell him," she said, "that he ought not to inter- 
fere with the housing of the evicted tenants." 

Lord Spencer riding through Dublin streets at that time 
in the midst of an armed guard, was a familiar and melan- 
choly sight. The sad thing was that in his first Viceroyalty 
he and his beautiful Countess, "Spencer's Fairy Queen," as 
the Irish loved to call her, had been very popular. Now 
he was no longer the Red Earl to the Dublin populace. He 
was "Foxy Jack." He was received in the streets for the 
most part with a sullen silence, broken by an occasional hiss. 
When someone saluted him his weary face lifted and he 
returned the salute with effusiveness. He was not the first 
nor the last amiable and high-minded English gentleman 
to have his heart broken by the hatred of the Irish. 

To me the memory of the League rooms in those days 
has something of the effect of an agreeable picnic. Unless 
someone took me home to lunch I did not bother about 
the meal. Very few girls of that day in Ireland bothered 
about solid meals. There was something much more de- 
lightful. There was a bounteous tea with abundant hot tea- 
cakes, bread and butter, and such contributions as anyone 
was minded to make. The contributions usually took the 
form of jam puffs. As I gave my services, such as they 
were, free, I was the guest of the League. I used to do 
very comfortably on hot tea-cakes and tea, much preferring 
them to anything more substantial. Occasionally some con- 
scientious person would give me a solid lunch, or at least 
something more solid than tea-cakes and tea; but I never 
wished for it. 

The hot tea-cakes were the contribution of a member of 
the League whose father was the owner of a Dublin bakery. 
The tea was contributed by another member, whose hus- 
band was a partner in a big wholesale grocery business. It 

[98] 



THE TROUBLED TIMES 

used to be a bright spot in the day that saw the prepara- 
tion for tea in an upstairs room with cupboards around 
the walls. 

Occasionally those of us who were not of the regular staff 
went off on our own business or pleasure.' I and one of 
the younger ones of the bookish family used to go occasion- 
ally to the Royal Dublin Society's library in Leinster House, 
get out volumes of poems, chiefly modern, and devour them. 

That was before the library and reading-room were 
housed in their present building. Except for the books on 
the shelves around the walls, the rooms were much the same 
as when the Leinster family had lived there. In the old 
brown dim rooms one might look up at any moment and 
see a ghost — the radiant beloved ghost of Lord Edward 
himself perhaps; or Pamela, beautiful and young; or the 
Duchess, Lord Edward's mother; or Lady Sarah Lennox — 
any one of the fine spirits by whom the old house must be 
haunted. 

No fine modern building will ever replace the strange 
delightful homeliness of that reading-room. There were 
two reading-rooms, properly speaking, for ladies. You en- 
tered the old house through the courtyard, which you might 
imagine crowded by ghostly coaches and sedans : link-boys 
running in the winter darkness with their trail of light: 
chairmen shouting : the big house flaming with lights : the 
coaches and chairs driving up and depositing their burdens. 

You passed under the very porch which had received the 
beauty, the wit, the greatness of the eighteenth century, 
and leaving the general reading-room on the left — as far as 
one could see through the half-glass door it was always 
crowded — you went up a stair, under a ceiling, by walls, 
stuccoed and gilt in the manner of the Irish Renaissance 
of the great years before the Rebellion and the Union. 

\.99l 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Whatever the men might do in the way of reading — a 
large proportion of them might have been only looking 
at the sporting-tips or the cricket, but I think not, since the 
Royal Dublin Society rooms were used by a more serious 
class — feminine Dublin read as little then as it does to-day. 
You passed along a high, twisting, narrow corridor, lined 
to the dim richness of the ceiling with books, and you 
came to the door of the ladies' reading-room. There was 
always a roaring fire in the outer room. The chairs were 
comfortable. The foot, coming in from Dublin's dread- 
fully muddy winter streets, sank in old rich carpets. The 
rooms were lit by deep eighteenth-century windows from 
floor to ceiling. A few portraits hung above the fireplace, 
among the books. There you were coming in from the 
wind-swept, rain-swept streets a guest in the house of a 
great family, in that delightful manner of being so com- 
pletely at home that you might do exactly as you liked in 
the absence of your hosts. For hours you might be abso- 
lutely alone, except for the ghosts in that delightful library. 
Feminine Dublin nowadays might perhaps come in and ask 
for the last tenth-rate London success. No one came novel- 
hunting in those days. Perhaps the austere beautiful air 
of the place forbade it. Perhaps the trumpery of a day was 
not to be found on those shelves. Certainly it was not on 
the shelves of those two rooms. I never took a book from 
their shelves. I wish I had now. They were such books 
as might have belonged to the Leinster family, old calf- 
bound, vellum-bound stately volumes. 

Now and again there was a serious reader. There were 
always one or two old ladies who lived and dozed away their 
days there. They did their simple cooking over the beauti- 
ful brass-lined fireplaces, no one gainsaying them. I don't 
think they ever read. They slept between their meals. 




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John E. Redmond 



Charles S. Parnell 




Fanny Parnell 



May Nally 



THE TROUBLED TIMES 

Sometimes they woke up and knitted for a while before 
sleeping again. They disturbed one no more than the ghosts. 

When you wanted a book you went out and touched an 
electric bell in the corridor. Presently a gentlemanly young 
man who looked as though he were a perfectly trained 
servant to the Muses would come soft-foot along the corri- 
dor, take your behests in a whisper and go his way. When 
he brought your book he knocked softly at the half-glass 
door, his eyes a miracle of discretion. That reading-room 
had a convent-like air of enclosure. Rarely, rarely came a 
librarian, and then with the deepest air of apology, an air 
that assured you he saw nothing — climbing a high library 
ladder to get a book from the upper shelves. 

Is there anywhere now such a refuge as this from the 
wind-swept, rain-swept winter streets ? A fig for your great 
rotundas with their promiscuity of reading and readers ! 
In those dim, lovely old rooms there was the very vie intime 
of the immortals who had lived there. You felt their ex- 
quisite influences in the air, all around you. You met them 
in the corridors : empty chairs creaked as they sat down 
and rose up. What a place to escape to from things that 
galled and fretted! 

It must have been there that I learnt to adore Lord Ed- 
ward Fitzgerald. He must have leant over me in some 
dim afternoon of shadows and made me his liege-woman 
so long as I should live. 

How much I owe to the bookish family who led me there ! 
In the ordinary course of things I should never have found 
my way there alone. The Royal Dublin Society was at that 
time very much the appanage of the Ascendancy in Dublin. 
The bookish family, being travelled and adventurous, had 
no hesitation in entering there and taking me with them. 
Oh indeed, I thank them with all my heart. What subtle 

[lOl] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

processes of education went on in my mind and heart in 
that lost paradise I cannot say. 

I read all the modern poetry I could lay my hands upon. 
I read Swinburne from end to end, and was at once alarmed 
and fascinated by him. It was hardly in the picture that I 
should have been reading Swinburne in those old rooms. I 
ought to have gone to the shelves and taken down some 
book which Lord Edward's own hand might have touched 
and consecrated. But I was starved for poetry. The fasci- 
nation of Swinburne, Morris, Rossetti, was yet about us. 
Poetry was being read by anybody who had pretentions to 
taste. The young men at Oxford and Cambridge were 
reading poetry, as were their sisters in parsonages and the 
houses of the professional classes. No such deadly blight 
lay upon poetry then as has fell upon it after the South 
African War. Even in non-reading Dublin — in the most 
unexpected places, you would find a Tennyson. 

In those rooms I suppose the Puritanical conscience was 
quiet since I read my Swinburne. Outside it reasserted it- 
self. Once, with the proceeds of a poem, I bought the latest 
Swinburne, "Tristram of Lyonesse." but afterwards found 
it a burden to my conscience. Dr. Joseph Kenny, one of the 
kindest, dearest men Ireland ever produced, discovering my 
scruple, took the book from me, sending me to a bookseller's 
to select what I liked in its place. I do not know what I 
selected. I daresay it was not half as good, for I was still 
in a very undeveloped state as regards my reading. 

The member of the bookish family who was my special 
friend gave me in those days a Tennyson, which, I think, 
must have been among the very beginnings of my book-shelf. 

Other expeditions we made besides those reading ones. 
We visited political prisoners at Kilmainham Jail. Once I 
accompanied one of the practical people to see Mr. Parnell. 

[ I02 ] 



THE TROUBLED TIMES 

It was the first time I had come face to face with him. We 
interviewed him, he standing in a sort of cage between two 
warders. Everything that was said was Hstened to by them. 
I stood in the background. I remember his direct sweeping 
glance towards me. It said he recognised you once and 
for all. He had an extraordinary gift of prescience. I 
wonder whether in those days he had an instinctive knowl- 
edge of those who were to stand by him in the days of his 
fall and of his greatness. 

I had no part in the conversation. I merely stood aside. 
Only one bit of the conversation remains in my memory. 
Hugh Gaffney, the son of the housekeeper at Avondale, a 
singularly gentle youth whose precision used to amuse us at 
the League, where he acted as a sort of confidential 
messenger, had been arrested that morning as a suspect. 

"Poor boy!" said Mr. Parnell with his delicate deliberate- 
ness, "his mother will have chills and fever." 

Those Gaffneys, by the way, had had their part in shaping 
the life zmd character of Mr. Parnell. How many Irish 
rebels have been made by the tales of their nurses! Old 
Gafifney at the gate-lodge at Avondale was old enough to 
remember the Rebellion. He used to tell how a rebel named 
Byrne was flogged from the mill to the old sentry-box in 
Rathdrum by the orders of a savage named Colonel Yeo. 
How this gallant gentleman ordered the lashes to be in- 
flicted on the front part of the body instead of the back; 
how the bowels protruded as the man ran stumbling and 
shrieking, "For the love of God have mercy on me. Colonel 
Yeo"; how the savagery was not abated till he died. 

In this story told by old Gaffney, the gatekeeper at Avon- 
dale, to the growing boy — Mr. Parnell used to tell it with- 
out apparent emotion — lay the genesis of a great Irish rebel. 

It was certainly not dull in those days at the League of- 

[ 103] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

fices. All manner of visitors used to come in. Now it 
would be a crowd of released suspects from the west or 
south, wild as mountain ponies, at once friendly and abashed. 
Such Members of Parliament as were not in jail or in Lon- 
don visited us from time to time. Mr. Edmund Leamy, 
one of the most delightful personalities of the movement — 
I am not sure that he was in Parliament at that time — 
used to come in, ruddy, blue-eyed, black-haired, and sit, 
with his glass in his eye, talking, occasionally letting the 
glass rest absently on some particularly pretty girl. Mr. 
John Redmond was a frequent visitor, and very pleasant 
and courteous he was, as he is, and very good to look at. 
There too came Mr. James Carew, debonair, fair, charm- 
ing. I should not like to say that these visits did not make 
a purple patch for some of us. 

Another visitor I remember was a Russian princess. She 
had been Molly Kelly, or something equally Irish, from 
Cork or Waterford, before she went as English governess 
to the children of a widowed Prince Paul or Dmitri, who 
fell in love with her blue Irish eyes and soft Irish ways 
and gave her the incredible promotion of making her his 
princess. There was nothing at all of the haughty aristo- 
crat about her as she talked to the girls whose lives had up 
to a point followed the same course as her own. Indeed I 
have an idea that she enjoyed being just Molly again. 

When Mr. Parnell was not in Kilmainham he too visited 
the League rooms. There was an electrical quality in the 
air when he was in the room. You might sit like a mouse 
and looking up suddenly his eyes would seem to be upon 
you, which was most disconcerting. But he really was not 
aware at the moment of your insignificance. He was look- 
ing inward, somewhere where you could not follow him, 

I remember once that an energetic lady, who was our 

[ 104 ] 



THE TROUBLED TIMES 

honorary treasurer, rebuked him because he came in Hke a 
conspirator wrapped in an old coat with capes, and a cap 
drawn down over his eyes. She told him it was no proper 
attire for the Uncrowned King of Ireland to wear. I think 
he only smiled with a grim amusement. 

I remember to have been present in the Court of Queen's 
Bench at the State trial of Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, Mr. 
Biggar, and others for conspiracy. It was a trial that lasted 
twenty days and ended in a disagreement of the jury. That 
was in 1880. 

It must have been after Mr. Parnell's release from Kil- 
mainham that the situation became difficult between himself 
and Miss Parnell as President of the Ladies' Land League. 
It may be conceded now frankly that he detested the or- 
ganisation, that in the hands of the sister as like him as 
a woman can be like a man it had taken a course of its 
own and one in many ways opposed to his wishes and 
policy. I think he froze the organisation out of existence 
by refusing further supplies. He simply would not answer 
letters, sign cheques, or do anything else demanded of him. 
At this time he had entered on his phase of a strange and 
somewhat eccentric behaviour, partly due to ill-health, partly 
doubtless because of his relations with the lady who was 
afterwards his wife. This does not pretend to be a history, 
but a thing of shreds and patches. Perhaps it was much 
later that I was aware of a letter written by him to a lady 
whom he considered instrumental in spreading the scandal 
about him and Mrs. O'Shea. I heard the letter read, and 
it was such that I shivered as though the lash had fallen on 
my own back instead of that of the unfortunate recipient. 
It was a masterpiece of dignified and terrible rebuke. 

Other things I remember before he had quarrelled with 
his sister over the Ladies' Land League — a piteous thing, 

[105] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

for they were devoted to each other — before he had entered 
on those years in which he was or seemed a roi faineant^ 
when it became possible for people to say that his lieutenants 
were greater than he and that his power was tottering to 
its fall. 

A new friend of those days, one of the friends whom my 
poetry had begun to make for me, told me about this time 
that at her sister's house in London she had heard Sir 
Charles Dilke prophesy the downfall of Parnell and that 
he would be replaced by Timothy Healy. "I detested him," 
she said, "sitting there in a chair and looking like a malevo- 
lent monkey as he sat and rubbed his hands together saying 
that Mr. Parnell was nothing at all and that Healy was 
the man," 

This was probably some years later, but there was as 
yet no hint of Mr. Parnell and the Divorce Court. Sir 
Charles Dilke's overwhelming disgrace was over and done 
with long before there was a thought of the Parnell disaster. 



[io6] 



CHAPTER IX 

1882-83 

My father was still engaged in coming and going between 
Ireland and the cattle markets of Great Britain when, on 
a lovely May Sunday of 1882, he arrived home with a 
white face and news of a terrible calamity. His little pony 
and trap had gone to meet him as usual at the North Wall 
boat which came in then at six o'clock in the morning. 
Driving home through the Phoenix Park he had come upon 
the cordon of police drawn about the blood-stained spot 
where Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke had been 
murdered on the previous evening. 

We had all been rejoicing over the Kilmainham. Treaty, 
the release of the political prisoners, and the good times 
that were coming. That was Black Sunday in Dublin. 
White faces everywhere : men talking in whispers : a black 
pall over the town. Nine years later we were to have an- 
other Black Sunday: but, oh, that was lifted by our tears. 
Love, even love in ruins and weeping, anger and the pas- 
sion for revenge upheld us. Once again the stars in their 
courses had fought against Ireland. From an unknown 
source, out of the void, had come the hand with the knife 
that had slain the new hope in Ireland as surely and ruth- 
lessly as it had hacked Lord Frederick Cavendish to death. 
Dublin was stunned. 

Our first thought was of the other Irish in England. 
England had grown accustomed to wild doings in Ireland. 
It was not now a question of an out-at-elbows, scarecrow, 
Irish landlord, not even of an Irish official. It was not now 
a matter of Irishmen settling a bloody account with each 

[ 107] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

other. Oh, no; it was now the fine flower of English aris- 
tocracy, a man humane, gentle, high-minded, come to Ire- 
land as a friend with a message of peace, in a moment 
of forgiveness, of undoing of old evil. The good days were 
just about to begin. And there was the ambassador of 
peace lying hacked to death within a few hours of his ar- 
rival in Dublin. 

I think the most anti-English of us had a sick sense of 
guilt in those first hours. We felt the blood was on our 
hands. The murders followed hard on a newspaper article 
which talked about the extermination of the Castle rats. 
Never were curses brought home to roost so suddenly and 
dramatically. 

I remember mooning about the hedgerows feeling the 
very sunlight sick. All the innocent delights of the fields 
had blood upon them. I must have returned to the house 
white- faced, for a sympathetic peasant woman said to me : 
"Don't take it so much to heart, avourneen. Sure it isn't 
the dead that's most to be pitied, God help them ! God help 
the Irish in England!" 

We said that to each other often in the days that fol- 
lowed when the air seemed full of blood and the brotherli- 
ness and sympathy were changed to sullenness and hatred 
and desire for revenge. For once again Ireland was thrown 
back into the melting-pot; there was to be another more 
drastic Crimes Act, and the atmosphere was charged with 
pessimism and despair. 

One element in the feeling of that day was that the Irish 
sense of hospitality was outraged by the death of Lord 
Frederick Cavendish. How many laments I heard during 
those days from simple people over the misfortune that it 
should have been he — just he — the English gentleman, and 
that he should have fought with his one drab weapon, his 

[io8] 



1882-83 

umbrella, against the knives that were meant not for him 
but for the Irish Under-Secretary. 

Michael Davitt had just been released from Portland. 
Mr. Parnell had gone to meet him and they were together 
at the Westminster Palace Hotel when the news reached 
them. Michael Davitt said to me afterwards that the hard- 
est thing that fell to him to do in his life was to walk into 
the dining-room of the hotel for breakfast and meet the 
swift flaming hatred of the English eyes. He and Mr. 
Parnell went in together. He said that the ordeal was as 
hard for one as the other. "I had a revolver in my pocket," 
he added, "and if I had been attacked I should have defended 
myself." 

One remembers the search for the weapons, for the 
murderers, and how the hue and cry was at fault for many 
days. Now on that fatal evening of the 6th of May a young 
brother and sister of mine were walking home from Dub- 
lin to our house at Clondalkin. They came by quiet wind- 
ing lanes. In one of the lanes they were pushed back to 
the wall by a car-load of men driven furiously and present- 
ing a wild and disordered aspect. As a matter of fact they 
were all but run down by the car. After they had recovered 
their fright they proceeded on their way. Coming upon a 
little river which crossed the road, the Coolfan River, be- 
tween Red Cow Village and Ballymount Lane, they were 
aware of the same party. The car was pulled up and some 
of the men were down washing something in the stream. 
They held back until the car had gone on its way. They 
were afraid. They said afterwards that the clear water 
had been lightly tinged with blood. They had seen the 
washing of the knives. 

On the morning of Sunday, May the 7th, there was found 
in the letter-box of a Dublin newspaper a letter containing 

[ 109] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the full details of the crime by one of the murderers — un- 
signed, of course. At the time it was thrown aside, being 
taken for a piece of spoof. It did not disappear, however, 
and later on its genuineness was discovered and the docu- 
ment given up to Dublin Castle. What spirit of bravado 
was it, what impulse to confession, that prompted the writ- 
ing of that letter, at such length, with such circumstance, 
within a few hours of the crime being committed. 

None of us associated with the murders James Carey, 
a red-bearded man who was something of a demagogue in 
the Dublin Corporation of those days. I do not think he 
belonged to the Land League. He was a sort of socialist 
person. But he certainly attended the Conventions of those 
days, and at a very crowded one in the Ancient Concert 
Rooms I, sitting in the gallery, had James Carey leaning 
over my chair, his breath on the back of my neck for a whole 
sitting. 

He was the worst type of conspirator. I know nothing 
of his motives, so I shall say nothing : but he used the cloak 
of religion to cover his schemes. Or — who knows? — his 
religion may have been genuine enough of its kind, although 
in his case it must have been a debased kind. He was presi- 
dent of the Sodality — i.e. a religious guild or body of men 
attached to his parish church — and he was ostensibly deeply 
attached to religion while he was seducing the men he after- 
wards betrayed. 

That was a horrible time when the trials of the Invincibles 
began. There was something of a terror in Dublin. I re- 
member someone sharply rebuking me when, passing by 
James Mullett's shop in Dorset Street, I pointed it out as 
belonging to an Invincible. "Do you want to get a knife 
in you ?" she asked. 

One remembers the terrible dramatic scene when James 

[no] 



1882-83 

Carey appeared on the witness-table to swear away the lives 
of his dupes. He was closely guarded. The dock was sur- 
rounded by armed warders and police. Nevertheless he 
might have been torn to pieces by the prisoners in the dock, 
who fought furiously to reach him through the cordon 
of warders and police, for Joe Brady was at his throat be- 
fore he was overpowered. If Joe Brady's fingers had been 
in time O'Donnell need not have swung. 

That was indeed a terrible summer in Ireland. Once 
I was in the Inchicore tram, which runs through the poorest 
part of Dublin and is much, almost entirely, used by the 
people, when I had this adventure: 

The tram was crowded as it usually was. It pulled up 
somewhere about Thomas Street, that most consecrated 
street of Dublin, where Emmet was captured and died, 
within sight of which Lord Edward was taken and re- 
ceived the wounds from which he died. A woman with 
a coarse red face, a child hanging to her skirts, got in. A 
hubbub broke out in the tram. There were demands for 
her expulsion. The bewildered conductor pleaded that he 
could not expel anyone who behaved properly and paid his 
or her fare. The tram went on again. The woman, scowl- 
ing, retreated into her corner, from which the other people 
held aloof. The most violent of the objectors had left the 
tram to wait for another. I sat opposite the woman and 
could ask no questions. She alighted at one of a little red- 
brick row of houses, just under the shadow of Kilmainham 
Jail. It was a dreadful little house with a dirty curtain 
pulled askew over the uncleaned window. Some women 
cursed as she went out : one or two spat after her. It was 
James Carey's wretched wife. 

Poor creature! An old lady, the daughter of an Irish 
judge long dead, gave me this reminiscence a couple of 

[III] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

years ago : Mrs. Carey was a friend of a nurse in the em- 
ployment of the family. Following the condemnation of 
the Invincibles, Mrs. Carey came to her by stealth. "For 
God's sake," she said, "if you have anything good about 
you give it to me, for we sail to-night," The nurse gave 
her a rosary beads and some religious medals and she went 
away with them. Poor creature, indeed! 

I remember, when the news came of James Carey's having 
been shot by O'Donnell on the steamer going out to Cape 
Town, that everyone thought it a most righteous deed. We 
all hoped and prayed that O'Donnell would not suffer for 
his act. We thought of him as a sort of male Charlotte 
Corday. I think he was something of a popular hero for 
the moment. Years later, before the demolition of Old 
Newgate Prison, when I stood in the grim alley called Bird- 
cage Walk, which was the cemetery of the hanged, I saw 
"O'D." scratched on the wall. 

Somewhere Mr. Timothy Healy has spoken of Earl 
Spencer's three years' agony in Ireland. Looking back, 
I doubt if the Irish even really hated Lord Spencer. They 
hated Mr. Forster; but somehow the solitary red-bearded 
man who rode so sadly through the streets of Dublin, 
guarded like an enemy, made an appeal to their imaginations. 
The Irish have their strange compunctions and sensitive- 
nesses. I don't think an ugly man, or an ugly woman, for 
the matter of that, is gilded for them by any circumstances. 
They remembered Lord Spencer in the gaiety and brilliance 
of his former Viceroyalty — young, splendid, and acclaimed, 
with his beautiful wife by his side; and while they called 
him "Foxy Jack," they were sorry for him. There was 
nothing middle-class about Lord Spencer. I think, when 
the day came for Lord Spencer to forgive the three years' 
agony, and with a great generosity to range himself on the 

[112] 



1882-83 

side of the Irish, they were very glad to go back to calling 
him the Red Earl, enjoying the picturesqueness of the title, 
Mr. William O'Brien's characteristically exuberant remark, 
in the day of the Union of Hearts, about blacking Lord 
Spencer's boots, represented a real repentance in the hearts 
of the Irish. I was through the troubled days in Ireland, 
and I can honestly say that, while the politicians and the 
newspapers raved against Lord Spencer, I never heard any- 
one of those in the movement say a single word against him 
in private. 

When was it in those troubled years that King Edward 
and Queen Alexandra came to Ireland, when there was 
trouble at Mallow Station while their train was held up. 
What I have said about Lord Spencer recalls this to me. 
The populace were very disaffected just then, but not 
towards the Prince and Princess of Wales, as they then 
were. I stood in Castle Street, caught accidentally in a 
crowd, while their carriage passed, and I heard the people 
bless the Princess's lovely face, because beauty always has 
its strong personal appeal for the Irish. I remember a 
rather violent Nationalist stating at that time that the 
Princess of Wales always looked frightened, and was afraid 
of the Irish. ''A pity," he said, "for there is no one in Ire- 
land who would hurt a hair of her head." 

Perhaps the breach between Mr. Parnell and his sister 
over the Ladies' Land League was never completely healed 
on this side of the grave. She was one of the few women 
of her day who had the heart of a revolutionary; and yet 
how simple, how kind, how gentle, how noble were all her 
ways and thoughts. The result of the breach with her 
brother was to make her more than ever a solitary. Prob- 
ably she was a solitary by nature, but during those strenuous 
years she came out of her hermitage and made friends. She 

[113] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

had a delightful laugh, clear, ringing, soft, as she had a 
voice delicate and distinguished, like her brother's. A gentle, 
shy-looking, little lady, with a delicately pretty face and an 
air of extreme quietness, she had the heart of a Joan of 
Arc. She was capable of all that makes for heroism. She 
had a very delightful sense of humour, and people used to 
tell her stories for the pleasure of capturing her laughter. 
Once in my presence something rather coarse was told her. 
She seemed as though she did not hear. Too great-minded 
in a way to utter a rebuke, her silence was the most perfect 
rebuke, and one really felt sorry for the culprit. 

In 1882 her sister Fanny died suddenly. I cannot say 
if religion influenced her at all, or if she was anything but 
a gentle Stoic. She took the death of her sister badly, with 
a fierce grief. I heard of her walking up and down, up 
and down, her rooms at Hume Street, with a swift impatient 
anguish, now and again turning to the one she allowed to 
be with her and demanding comfort. "Do you believe that 
the dead live somewhere ? Do you believe that we see them 
again?" The one who was with her, a clever, erratic girl, 
sought to comfort her with the belief of all times and all 
peoples in some sort of resurrection of the dead. Perhaps 
it was not enough : perhaps she wanted more than that, 
the strong, personal belief to warm her cold heart by. 

She was my visitor some time that year, or the year after- 
wards, at my old home. I remember that we walked in the 
fields, early summer fields, and that there was a mackerel 
sky, for she pointed it out, and we wondered if rain was 
coming. Just as she delighted in the personal beauty of 
the girls she had drawn about her she delighted in their gifts. 
She was interested in the mental as well as the physical 
gifts, and I remember that she talked about my poetry, 
and suggested to me that I should write novels like Kings- 

[114] 



1882-83 

ley's, into which poetry came. At this time my novel- 
writing was far away. She dressed very simply herself, yet 
with a certain elegance; and she had a most feminine in- 
terest in the garments of her friends. She was generous in 
her admirations as she was in all else; and one girl who had 
a humble opinion of her own attractiveness was touched 
to sheer sharp pleasure by a speech of Miss Parnell's re- 
peated to her which was too kind. 

One thinks of her fading further and further away from 
the actual world. She glided through life as someone who 
had very little to do with the hard facts of it; and yet she 
was exquisitely human. Her life ought to have been written, 
for she was a great woman, and yet I think she herself would 
have preferred that her name be writ in water. 

One little thing about her that was very characteristic 
was the way she came and went alone. In Dublin at that 
day it was a convention that no lady unaccompanied should 
walk through at least the centre of the town after certain 
hours. Grafton Street especially was a street in which it 
would be a scandal for a lady to appear unaccompanied 
after the shops were closed. But Grafton Street lay in the 
direct path between the League Offices in Upper Sackville 
Street and Hume Street. So she took it. Perhaps she was 
unaware of the convention, or despised it. Anyhow, you 
might have come upon her quite late in the evening — when 
even accompanied one did not care very much for Grafton 
Street; for the convention left it largely to undesirables, of 
one sex at all events — gliding like a swift shadow on her 
way, apart in the hustling and rowdy crowd, quite alone, 
remote, wrapt away in her own thoughts. She was a fiery- 
hearted vestal. Under her delicate, shy coldness, she hid 
passion and gentleness. 

The last time I ever saw her was in 1889. She had a 

[115] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

great gift of painting, and found much solace in it. Visit- 
ing the New Gallery in Regent Street in the summer of 
that year, in company with W. B. Yeats, I came upon her, 
rapt in contemplation of a picture. We stood and talked 
for a few minutes. She told me that she had come from 
Cornwall, where she had been painting. I suppose she was 
short-sighted, for she took my companion to be Mr. John 
Dillon, a most unlikely thing. She was very much inter- 
ested in finding who it was. 

Before I finish with the Ladies' Land League, I must 
make a reference to some of its activities which used to 
awake my deepest admiration. On the suppression of 
United Ireland, or perhaps on the arrest of its staff, the 
Ladies' Land League undertook to bring out the paper, 
which it did for some two or three weeks. When it was no 
longer possible, Hannah Lynch carried over the type to 
Paris, and the paper was issued from there. I remember 
going in and out of the offices in Lower Abbey Street, where 
the women, girls rather, were in command both in the edi- 
torial rooms and the counting house. Those were the days 
when a ragged urchin would dart round a street corner, 
and slip a Suppressed United Ireland into your hand, and 
fly before the approach of a policeman. The ballad-singers 
used to sing a street song, of which I remember only a bit 
of the chorus : — 

"He loved his country well, 

And now he's in Kilmainham Jail, 
Brave Charles Stewart Parnell." 

This ballad was sung spasmodically between rushes from 
the police. 

One night I was staying with the Walshe sisters, Mar- 
garet already being in bed, I preparing to go to mine, talk- 
ing over the fire in Margaret's room, when Bee entered. 

[Ii6] 



1882-83 

"Miss Parnell wants you to go to Paris," she said to her 
sister. "When?" "Now, to-night: this minute. Hurry, 
hurry, hurry!" A minute later: "What are you fumbHng 
over? You'll miss the boat." Margaret, pathetically : "Do 
light a candle, Bee-een. I can't find my stockings by this 
light." "Go without your stockings then," said Bee. 

As I have said, I was a most unserious member of the 
League. I was in its friendships and affections, but not in 
its counsels. Hence the desultoriness and unimportance of 
these scraps of memories. 

In that year of 1883 — was it the winter of 1882-83? — 
Michael Davitt was sent to Kilmainham for six months. 
My father and I used to visit him weekly. He always said 
that his first visit after his release should be to us. I think 
it must have been an afternoon of summer when he came, 
for I remember that one of my sisters was working in the 
garden, wearing a sun-bonnet and tried not to be seen, but 
he insisted on seeing her and being introduced to her. She 
was a very pretty girl, and he was much taken with her. 
He wrote after his visit that one of his great pleasures had 
been to draw out of her shyness a charming and modest 
little gardener. They were rather susceptible, the political 
Irishmen of those days. I rather envied my sister his obvi- 
ous admiration : but she did not care about it. It is not to 
every girl that a one-armed man is transfigured because he 
is a hero. 

Another of my memories of 1883 is of the banquet fol- 
lowing the Parnell Tribute. I was in the gallery with other 
women watching the men feast in the Round Room of the 
Rotunda. What barbarous days! I rather imagine that 
some refreshments were handed up by athletic males to some 
of their feminine belongings. I believe we could get tea. 

[117] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

But I was at an age, of a people, to which food is a very 
secondary matter. 

Mr. Barry O'Brien tells us that the £40,000 Tribute was 
presented at Morrison's Hotel, Dublin, a couple of days 
before the banquet, else I should have imagined that I saw 
the cheque presented at the banquet. Was it the illuminated 
address of which I have a photographic repioduction, or 
does memory play me a trick? I certainly think I saw 
something presented. The £40,000, which was to clear away 
Mr. Parnell's financial embarrassments, was presented by 
a Lord Mayor who had not only literary gifts, but a pretty 
taste in the Classics. It was reported of him that he said 
he read a page of Sappho every morning before breakfast; 
but that doubtless was a lively invention of the capital that 
vies with Paris and Athens in its carrying of the news, and 
cares little for accuracy so long as it may laugh. Mr. 
Parnell interrupted him, just as the oration began to roll 
from his lips, with: "Is this cheque for me?" "Yes, Mr. 
Parnell." "Ah, is it made payable to bearer?" Mr. Barry 
O'Brien tells this story solemnly, I always heard it told 
as an example of saturnine humour on Mr. Parnell's part. 

There was a song which used to be sung in Dublin at 
many social gatherings before the time came when it would 
have been a profanation to sing it — adapted, I believe, from 
Mr. A. D. Godley. I give it here as a curiosity, since none 
had the heart to sing it after 1891 : 

"Come all thrue-hearted pathriots who Ireland's wrongs deplore, 
I'll tell yez of the cruellest wrong that ever was done before ; 
Before this wrong all other wrongs of Ireland do grow pale, 
For they locked the Pride of Erian's Isle into dark Kilmainham jail. 

It was the tyrant Gladstone, an' he said unto himself, 
'I never will be aisy till Parnell is on the shelf ; 
Make haste and get the warrant out and take it be the mail, 
For we'll lock the Pride of Erian's Isle into dark Kilmainham jail.' 

[118] 



1882-83 

So Buckshot made the warrant out, and buttoned up his coat ; 
He took the train at London town to catch the Kingstown boat. 
The weather it was rather rough, and he was feelin' queer, 
When Mallon and the polis came to meet him on the pier. 

But calmly slept the pathriot, for he was kilt wid work, 
Haranguin' of the multitude in Limerick and Cork; 
When Mallon an' the polis came and rang the front-door bell, 
Disturbin' of his slumbers in bould Morrison's Hotel. 

Then up and spoke bould Morrison — 'Get up your sowl an* run, 
An' bright shall shine in history's page the name of Morrison. 
There's Mallon waitin' at the door wid fifty min an' more, 
Get up your sowl, put on your shirt, out be the kitchen door.' 

But proudly flashed the pathriot's eye as he sternly answered 'No. 
'Twill never be said that Parnell turned his back upon the foe. 
Parnell aboo for liberty! 'Tis all the same,' says he, 
'For Mallon has locked the kitchen dure and taken away the key.' 

They took him and they bound him then, those minions of the law, 
'Twas Pat the Boots was lookin' on, an' he tould me all he saw; 
But divil a foot the Pathriot would stir from there until 
They granted him a ten per cent, reduction on his bill. 

Had I been there with odds behind of forty or more to one, 

It makes my blood run cold to think o' the deeds I might have done ; 

It isn't here to-night I'd be a-tellin' a dismal tale, 

How they locked the Pride of Erian's Isle into dark Kilmainham jail." 



["9] 



CHAPTER X 

EARLY FRIENDS 

I WILL now hark back to the beginnings of my own Hterary 
career, in which at least I had a prominence not afforded me 
by poHtics. My first important literary event was the begin- 
ning of my friendship with Father Matthew Russell, S.J., 
the brother of the man who afterwards became Lord Chief 
Justice of England, a friendship happily unbroken for some 
two-and-thirty years, till this day when Father Russell, at 
the age of 78, is lying dangerously ill — with just the thinnest 
of divisions, as transparent as a sheet of white paper, be- 
tween him and Heaven.* 

I had already gathered some few sheaves — a few poems 
in the Graphic, the sonnet in the Spectator, a few poems 
here and there in Dublin newspapers — when I had the happy 
thought, for me, of sending a poem to the Irish Monthly. 
It was a legend of a Dominican, Blessed James of Ulm, 
one of the stock of stories which I had gathered greedily 
during those bookless Convent school days, and the manner 
of it was founded on Longfellow's Legend Beautiful. I 
was then in the Longfellow stage. Indeed I remained in 
it for a long time, which shows that I retained my youth- 
fulness for a long time. It must have been some time in 
the later eighties that, pointing out my books to W. B. 
Yeats, I remarked joyfully on my possession of Longfellow 
and Shelley — actually speaking the two names in the same 
breath. "Shelley, of course," said W. B. Yeats, "but why 
Longfellow?'' I replied with some heat that I liked Long- 

*Father Russell died on September 12, 1912. 
[ 120] 




Father AIatthew Russell, S.J. 



EARLY FRIENDS 

fellow, which was quite true. I belonged to a very unexact- 
ing set of young writers in Ireland to whom W. B. Yeats 
had not yet shown the way. 

However, fluent-feeble as my narrative poem was, there 
was something in it that pleased Father Russell. He pub- 
lished it in the Irish Monthly, and it was the precursor of 
several things of the same kind, which pleased my little 
circle very much. I think it must have been such things 
that engaged me as I sat, my head throbbing with neuralgia, 
in company with many volumes of magazines and a flowing 
bowl of watery lemonade. My father, of course, was par- 
ticularly pleased, and somewhat amazed at these produc- 
tions. I was rather offended when it was repeated to me 
that he had said to someone of a thing called "The Legend 
of the Sorrowful Mother," "J^st think of Kate writing 
all that about babies — why, I never knew her to take any 
notice of a baby in her life." Which was quite true, but 
none the less unpalatable, since it pricked a hole in my 
sentiment. 

Before I met Father Russell, I had visited, while in Lon- 
don in the autumn of 1880, Mr. Arthur Locker, my kind 
editor of the Graphic. I happened on a somewhat fortunate 
hour. The editor was free to see me and in a very good 
temper. He sent me away walking on air, for he had prom- 
ised to send me pictures to write verses to and various 
other things. He spoke to me of the state of affairs in 
Ireland. English feeling was very much excited just then 
over murders and outrages in Ireland. He spoke of a land- 
lord who had recently been shot, one of those strange people 
who, I think, existed nowhere outside Ireland. A man with 
a title, he led a most tatterdemalion existence. He was 
very poor and very eccentric. He drank hard and there 
were strange tales of his carousals with the police, and of 

[121] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

how he and the poHce together would awake the village 
in the small hours, battering at the publican's door for 
more drink. He had an ancient barouche, in which the 
fowl lived unless his Lordship required it, when they would 
be evicted; and with very little trouble of cleaning-up, his 
Lordship would drive off to a fair, returning with the 
barouche full of his purchases — more fowl, a calf or two, 
perhaps a little pig. It was still Anglo-Ireland of the 
eighteenth century, of the Castle Rackrent period, that 
strange time of a wildness which was dull, and an un- 
humourous humour, except for the looker-on, a racketing 
which was irresponsible yet never lighthearted. The Anglo- 
Irish squire of the eighteenth century lived in his cups, and 
his frolics were solemn-drunk. 

The poor scarecrow peer! I do not know what he had 
done to be shot. Yet, shot he was. Mr. Locker talked of 
him as though he were an English peer, a person of broad 
acres and great responsibilities. I said nothing. I had 
not the courage to avow that I was a member of the Land 
League, lest the whole fabric of our friendship, glistening- 
new, should tumble down. 

Through Father Russell I made other literary friends. 
There was Miss Rosa Mulholland, his kinswoman, whom 
coming to know I worshipped wholeheartedly, I have often 
thought what a gain it was to me that I was brought up 
amid unliterary surroundings, since I came to the new life 
so freshly. Everybody who wrote was a wonder to me : an 
editor, even a Dublin one, was of the Olympians; as for a 
London editor he was unapproachable as a King. Miss 
Mulholland had contributed poems as a very young girl to 
the Cornhill of the great days about which yet the associa- 
tion of Thackeray lay as a veil of light. She had been most 
highly approved by Charles Dickens and had written more 

[ 122] 



EARLY FRIENDS 

than one serial and many short stories for All the Year 
Round. She had studied art as a girl student, and Millais 
had been interested in her, in the first place because she had 
selected Ruth Millais as her pen-name, and had volunteered 
to illustrate her in the CornhilL She had touched with high 
gods and goddesses. She had visited George Eliot. All 
this was so dazzling to me that I could scarcely bear the 
light which flowed upon me. I could scarcely believe in 
my own good fortune when I was admitted to Miss Mul- 
holland's friendship. For her re-awoke the idealising pas- 
sion which in my schooldays I had given to my first love. 
I have had few things in my life more exquisite than those 
afternoons I used to spend with her, when, after a country 
walk, we would come back to tea to a room at the top of 
a house high up on the northern outskirts of Dublin. The 
window had a screen of narcissi and green grass blown by 
the wind. Or at least that is my memory of it. I suppose 
I must have been there in full summer, in winter. My mem- 
ory is of a virginal April, young and a little cold, and the 
narcissi in the window boxes in bloom. 

That I had had those distractions accounts perhaps for 
my not being absorbed into the political life I touched with. 
That high room on the northern outskirts of Dublin had a 
view of the country. We used to sit and talk of books and 
ourselves, discovering with amazement thoughts and feel- 
ings in common. Sometimes we had tea first and walked 
afterwards in the country through the Green Lanes of 
Clontarf, out by Glasnevin village with its memories of 
Mary Delany and her friends. Dean Swift, Lord Orrery, 
Sheridan : all the beaux and wits and scholars of the Dublin 
of the eighteenth century. On those occasions we used to 
come back to a tall red house on Drumcondra Hill, from 

[ 123 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the upper windows of which you saw the Bay of Dublin 
and Dublin in its smoke lying below your feet. 

Some of the most beautiful memories of my girlhood, 
of my life, centre about that house, and about Mrs. Atkin- 
son, who lived there and was my friend's dearest friend. 
We used to come home from our country walks to that 
high house, which was built upon a sort of causeway 
ascended by many steps from the sunken roadway. The 
steps up to the house were also steep, so that one had the 
impression of a house built high in air. Certainly they 
were high pure winds that blew about it. It was one of the 
old comfortable roomy houses of the latter end of the 
eighteenth century, probably built soon after the Renaissance 
under the Rutland Viceroyalty, which set the Irish Lords 
and Commons and Dublin generally to building and decorat- 
ing like kings and princes. 

My friend used to give three little sharp raps with her 
knuckles at her friend's door, and look at me with an eager 
air of expectancy. The signal was recognised : the door 
opened : we passed into an atmosphere which had something 
heavenly about it. 

Sarah Atkinson was one of those saints of everyday life 
whose sanctity manifests or develops itself in the ordinary 
human duties and ministrations. She was a woman of large 
intellect, and she had a grave, beautiful, sweetly-coloured 
face, with eyes which were homes of tranquillity. One could 
never imagine her being irritable or vexed by small things, 
any more than one could imagine her trivial or rancorous. 
She wrote a good deal, chiefly on the social and economical 
history of Ireland, and she did many good works. If she 
had been able to give herself to writing, she might have 
written us the history of Ireland we stand in need of. Mr. 
Lecky paid a warm tribute to her historical work. Her 

[ 124 ] 



EARLY FRIENDS 

temperament, calm, dispassionate, was the ideal tempera- 
ment for an historian. 

That was a house in which one found the bookish atmos- 
phere at its best, rarefied and sweetened by lofty spiritual 
faith and ideals. There were books everywhere, in the hall, 
around the rooms, in niches on the staircase. There were 
pictures and busts — many relics of foreign travel. I re- 
member a colour print of the beautiful Visitation — of 
Luini, is it? — which met you when you entered the house. 
The meeting of the two Holy Women at their mysterious 
hour in that setting of a white loggia, with the ultramarine 
sky of Italy beyond the pillars, seemed to give a keynote 
to the feeling within those doors. 

Mrs. Atkinson, when I went in the mornings, as I some- 
times did, would be at her writing-table. I used to come in 
about twelve o'clock after a journey from the other side 
of the County Dublin, happy to be there and very hungry. 
Perhaps she knew how very happy I was to be there, for 
there was always a warm welcome, though now in my work- 
ing years I feel that my coming must sometimes have been 
inopportune. I could stay as long as I would, but close on 
my appearance would follow a tray with my simple lunch, 
bread with a pat of butter, a dish of excellent jam, and a 
glass jug with milk. She knew that I must be hungry 
after my journey and an early breakfast, and the first thing 
she did was to feed me. Being fed — and the simple meal 
as I look back to it seems to have been a delicious one — 
she would talk and let me talk as long as I liked. If I was 
a bore I never suspected it; yet I was very thin-skinned, 
although I was as sure of the friendship of my world — 
so long as it was friendly — as a puppy. With a puppy's 
adventurousness, too, I believe I had the sublime audacity 
to call on Mrs. Atkinson in the first place without intro- 

[125] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

duction, although she had heard of me from Father Russell. 
I remember with what a beating heart I made the expedi- 
tion, and the warm kindness which I found at its end. Ah, 
well! It is one of the terrible sadnesses of the world that 
such things and people must pass, 

Mrs. Atkinson was married to a delightful old Dr. Atkin- 
son, a good many years older than herself. He too was a 
great reader. He had been part proprietor of a Dublin 
daily paper, and had taken a certain dignified part in politics 
with O'Connell. He and Mrs. Atkinson represented the 
old-fashioned, dignified, high-minded Catholic party, the 
party which had flocked in later years round Isaac Butt's 
Home Rule movement. Turbulent Nationalist Ireland of 
the eighties would have called them Whigs. They were 
a sort of Girondists to the Reds of those days. 

It was characteristic of them that when "respectable" 
Dublin, Catholic perhaps even more than Protestant, held 
aloof from the League and its doings. Dr. and Mrs. Atkin- 
son, she with her impartial historical mind, had no word 
of condemnation. It was not vulgar to be a Leaguer in 
that house, where an atmosphere of high-thinking shut out 
all that was sordid. 

Indeed, I remember a little later accompanying Mrs. 
Atkinson to visit a prisoner at Kilmainham Jail — one 
Thomas Moroney, a farmer from the County Limerick, 
who was imprisoned for taking forcible possession of his 
farm after he had been evicted from it. I think he was 
there alone in his glory. Perhaps it was in '86, for I have 
an impression of the movement on a wave of prosperity, 
and poor Thomas Moroney forgotten, left behind. 

I had no note-books at that time, and I have to trust 
entirely to memory, which has such a disconcerting way of 
discarding and retaining, apparently after no plan. I don't 

[126] 



EARLY FRIENDS 

think there was any of the tiresome paraphernaHa of the 
cage and the listening warder, such as I remember in the 
days when I visited Mr. Parnell and Michael Davitt. My 
impression is of a large, rather light room, and no limita- 
tion or witness of the interview. We did not do much 
talking. Thomas Moroney was very ready to do the talk- 
ing. He was a simple, rosy-faced old farmer. I remember 
him talking about Mr. Willie Redmond in the suspect days 
when they were together in Kilmainham. Mr. Willie Red- 
mond is one of the fortunate ones who win affection all their 
days. Some simple pranks of his were a pleasant memory 
with Thomas Moroney. There had been a time when the 
devoted female sympathisers with Mr. Parnell and his men 
rained on them green smoking-caps — that incredible mid- 
Victorian adornment — embroidered or braided in silk, and 
slippers to match, with many other things. I remember 
when a demand came to the Ladies' Land League from 
some wild suspects of the southern or western seaboard 
for a supply of night-caps. The suspects had a way of 
becoming spoilt and demanding impossible luxuries. 

Mr. Parnell would never wear any of the green smoking- 
caps, nor indeed anything else green. It was one of his 
several superstitions to hold the green unlucky. To every 
suspect there must have been a smoking-cap, or two or three. 
Apparently Mr. Willie Redmond had perched the smallest 
of the skull-caps on the top of his red curls — "Och, that 
was the play-boy!'' said Thomas Moroney, with an air of 
happy reminiscence. Thomas Moroney talked a great deal. 
I remember Mrs. Atkinson's slight look of embarrassment 
at me as a young girl when he dropped into a plain state- 
ment. We were more squeamish then than we are now. 

Mrs. Atkinson was really responsible for setting me up 
with a bookshelf of my own. She gave me, among other 

[ 127] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

books, Coventry Patmore's Odes, which she declared be- 
yond her, Keats, her own big biography, Mary Aikenhead: 
her Life, her Work, and her Friends, which contained in- 
cidentally a deal of history. I think it was the Introduc- 
tion to Mary Aikenhead that Mr. Lecky found worthy of 
high praise. She gave me some score books in all, and 
a little later these were supplemented by a gift of books 
from Count Plunkett, who is now Director of the Dublin 
National Museum. About 1883-84 he was publishing for 
the love of literature a real review^, Hihernia. There was a 
deal of taste and scholarship in it. There Miss Jane Barlow 
made her first appearance. But of course it did not last 
long: it was too bookish for Dublin. One or two of my 
poems appeared in it, and the kind editor gave me a de- 
lightful addition to my bookshelf. It included the Horoe 
Suhsecivce of Dr. John Brown, one or two volumes of 
Stevenson, a couple of anthologies, and a very rare and 
precious little book of poems by Aubrey de Vere, Inisfail. 
A very little supplementing from the long list of his volumes 
of verse, and Aubrey de Vere would be more worthily rep- 
resented by Inisfail than by all the heavy volumes which 
have swamped his really distinguished and beautiful poetry. 
I must say a few words more about Mrs. Atkinson and 
her husband and all that their friendship meant to me. It 
is the dearer to look back upon that it included my father. 
On my morning visits I did not see Dr. Atkinson. He used 
to go off into town every morning to see The Times and 
the English reviews at his club; but in the afternoon one 
might always find him sitting by a table in the dining-room, 
which opened by folding doors from his wife's workroom, 
cutting and reading one of the monthly reviews. He was 
already well on in the seventies, and he had a pride in his 
age. He was one of those delightful, hale, hearty old men, 

[128] 



EARLY FRIENDS 

as cheerful as a robin, in whom old age is frosty but kindly. 
He had a most cheerful humour, and he brought a brisk 
masculine air into an atmosphere which otherwise might 
have been for some people too austere. I loved to hear him 
state an opinion with a definiteness which would make his 
wife say under her breath, "Oh, George!" He worshipped 
his wife and honoured all women for her sake, and he had 
that masculine youthfulness about him that one could never 
think of him as old. 

These two loved to bring intellectual society about them. 
They had several friendships at the English universities as 
well as the Irish. The dinner-parties they gave were very 
quiet, but the few guests were always distinguished in one 
way or another. There used to be very good music in the 
drawing-room after those dinners, and the conversation was 
worth listening to. Mrs. Atkinson was well fitted to be 
the leader of a salon, an institution which we have never 
had in Dublin, where there has long been a felt want of 
such a thing. If a young writer or artist of promise ap- 
pears in Dublin there is no one to take him or her by the 
hand, until the outside world — that is to say, the world of 
England — has accepted the writer or artist, and so made 
recognition at home superfluous and without grace. 

Among those I used to meet at Mrs. Atkinson's table was 
Dr. Shaw, the brilliant Fellow of T.C.D., who was also 
editor of the Dublin Evening Mail. His daughter, Mrs. 
R. Y. Tynell, and his family are now among my closest 
and dearest friends. He was exceedingly witty, and his 
cousin, Mr. George Bernard Shaw, resembles him in that 
he has a sparkling and even biting wit, with a humane per- 
sonality which makes the wit clean and unpoisoned. The 
Evening Mail of those days used to be something to be read 
for its wit. Under Dr. Shaw it had such a sparkling exist- 

[ 129] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

ence as had the Pall Mall during the never-to-be-forgotten 
days when it was edited by Mr. Henry Cust, with the assist- 
ance of All the Talents. 

In the ordinary course of things, I would hardly have met 
Dr. Shaw at that time. The cleavage between Catholic and 
Protestant in Ireland — as complete now as it was in those 
days, and more embittered by the fact that the Protestants 
no longer control all place and patronage — prevented their 
meeting, unless the circumstances were exceptional. In this 
case they were exceptional. 

I was usually the youngest guest at that board, and I was 
very well content with the society of my elders. I used 
to sit by my host, and he made something of a pet of me. 
I remember at quiet dinners there, when there were no 
guests beside myself and Miss Mulholland, that he had a 
special dish of hot lobster, which he used to share with me. 
Perhaps no one else would venture upon it, coming as it 
did at the end of a meal. He always had a certain kind 
of biscuits with his wine which I never saw elsewhere. 
They had been manufactured for some seventy years by a 
very old-fashioned firm of pastry-cooks in Dublin. The first 
time I dined with him he told me that in the year 1815 he 
used to buy those biscuits at the very same shop where he 
now bought them. Long afterwards I said suddenly : "You 
used to buy these buscuits in the year 181 5 at Edwardes' in 
Cavendish Row." "God bless my soul!" he said, staring 
at me, "I did indeed. But how could you know ?" 

His friendship for my dear father was something, if more 
was needed, to make me hold his memory in everlasting love 
and gratitude. 

Dr. Atkinson conceived a very warm affection and ad- 
miration for my father. He used to come and see us on 
spring and summer days, coming out by the tram to Inchi- 

[ 130 ] 





William Redmond 



Wilfrid Blunt 
(in prison dress) 




Michael Davitt 



EARLY FRIENDS 

core, where my father met him with his Httle pony-trap and 
drove him away over his farms and through the country be- 
fore bringing him back to the house for lunch. There were 
many such visits before the day when Mrs. Atkinson said 
to m.e : ''Don't ask him any more : he is too old" ; and she 
said it as a mother might have said "He is too young." 

Beautiful days and beautiful memories. I daresay there 
were vexations and frets then, but I do not remember them. 
As I look back, all those days lie under a golden haze. I 
don't think any guest received as much consideration from 
Dr. Atkinson as my dear father. Mrs. Atkinson was equally 
kind : but Dr. Atkinson used to single him out for honour, 
and for that I do dearly love him. 

I remember once that Mrs. Atkinson showed me the 
picture of a beautiful young cousin or niece, mentioning 
that she was at that moment on a visit to Lady Russell in 
London. Dr. Atkinson looked up from his review. 

"Sir Charles was here yesterday," he said. "He had never 

seen and we showed him the photograph. He said: 

'Good Lord! Is that the girl that's loose among my boys? 
Where's my hat?'" 

I like this anecdote of Lord Russell, who, some people 
would have us believe, never unbent. He was too big a man 
for that cold view of him. 

There was a time when I visited hospitals with Mrs. 
Atkinson, as I used sometimes come to her early in the 
afternoon and go to an exquisite little church just round the 
corner from Drumcondra Terrace for Benediction, before 
the happy social afternoon to follow. Perhaps I ought to 
say "hospital," for it was the Richmond Hospital I visited, 
and it was characteristic of Mrs. Atkinson that the Rich- 
mond was not one of the Catholic hospitals of Dublin. In 
the same way she gave much kind hospitality to the young 

[131] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

matron of a distinctly Protestant convalescent home close 
by her house, the lady being English as well as Protestant, 
and so somewhat lonely. 

The immediate occasion of my accompanying Mrs. At- 
kinson on that visit was that a certain Miss Cassie O'Hara, 
who wrote poetry, was a patient there. 

Mrs. Atkinson dressed as nearly like the Sisters of 
Charity, who were her great friends^, as possible. The long 
black cloak, the black bonnet and veil were very nun-like. 
She left me with Cassie O'Hara while she went round the 
beds. She knew all the patients, and she had a little gift 
for each, something much desired, in the capacious black 
bag she carried. The patients used to watch her approach 
with something of the look which the soldiers in the Crimea, 
who used to kiss Florence Nightingale's shadow when it 
fell on their beds as she went round the wards with a light, 
might have sent to greet her. 

Cassie O'Hara, who had been a very beautiful girl, had 
lupus in the face. The terrible disease was sufficiently rare 
to make her case very interesting to the medical profession 
in Dublin, and doubtless her youth and beauty gave the 
thing an added poignancy. Anyhow, the good surgeons of 
the Richmond Hospital had set their hearts on making a 
cure of the case, though they could not save the beauty. 
There were no Finsen Lamps or anything of that sort then. 
The treatment must have been much more simple and 
radical. 

As I saw Cassie O'Hara when she lay in bed, she was 
piteous but not terrible. The disfigurement was covered 
with lint, which lay in a broad bandage across the nose. 
Above the bandage were beautiful grey eyes, dark-lashed, 
a broad white forehead and golden hair, rippling and curl- 

[ 132] 



EARLY FRIENDS 

ing. Below the bandage was a sweet mouth, a firm white 
chin, and the traces of a wild-rose colouring. 

She had no regrets. Indeed, she said to me that her heart 
had been so hard and she had been so worldly, that she 
felt that God took this hard way, the only way to save her 
soul. 

They did eradicate the lupus at the Richmond Hospital. 
They did all science and devotion could do, but the disfigure- 
ment remained. Everyone was fretted to think of how she 
would face the world terribly disfigured, and she but in 
the early twenties. God opened a door. There was a ter- 
centenary or some such occasion of St. Teresa. The Spanish 
Carmelites, among other celebrations, offered a large sum 
of money for a prize poem on St. Teresa. Cassie O'Hara's 
poem was adjudged the best. Through this they offered her 
admission to the Order. Because of the terrible disfigure- 
ment she was ineligible for the convents of nuns which touch 
with the world in any way. With the Carmelites it was 
different. Perpetual enclosure, perpetual silence, a perpetual 
veil. As Sister Teresa of Jesus, Cassie O'Hara disappeared 
most happily into the life where she need never meet the eyes, 
the shrinking of her fellow-creatures. 



[ 133 ] 



CHAPTER XI 

DISCURSIVE 

At Mrs, Atkinson's house I met from time to time English 
visitors as well as the best Dublin could afford in a literary 
and intellectual way. There were a couple of Cambridge 
dons and their wives. There was a tall, beautiful girl, an 
heiress and the ward of an English Catholic peer, who had 
the peculiar exotic beauty of the old English Catholic fam- 
ilies. There was Madame Belloc, who was Mrs. Atkinson's 
great friend, through whom she was a friend of Madame 
Bodichon and knew George Eliot. Several years later I 
met Marie Belloc there. She was then a girl of about twenty, 
and very much interested in the things she was going to do. 
I think she foresaw fiction rather than journalism, though 
she was to arrive at fiction after a long success in journal- 
ism. I remember how she added to the pleasure of the eve- 
ning by singing gay French chansons to her banjo, and 
very charming she looked with the blue ribbon about her 
neck and her pretty head bent above the banjo. Another 
of Mrs. Atkinson's guests was Mr. Charles O'Connor, now 
Master of the Rolls. Our musician on those occasions was 
Mr. MacDermott, who played for his delight and ours 
equally. 

Through Father Russell I came to pay a visit to Pro- 
fessor Dowden one summer afternoon. That was in very 
early days, and I rather wonder now at my temerity in going. 
I found Mr. Dowden very kind, and ready to show me pic- 
tures and books and autographs that interested me im- 
mensely. I only saw him once. He had a gentle refinement 
of look and manner which remains in my memory. I dare 

[134] 



DISCURSIVE 

say I made a visitation instead of a visit, and I am sure 
that if my visit afforded little pleasure to those who received 
it, it afforded a very great deal to me. 

I was now fairly launched, out of my placid stream of 
life. In 1882, when the Irish Exhibition was held in the 
Rotunda Gardens, Dublin, I had met accidentally one day 
in the Exhibition, about which I wandered as though I 
owned it, the Rev. Henry Stuart Fagan, a Norfolk parson 
of Irish birth, with a passion for Ireland which survived 
bad days and good days alike. We talked, and the talk 
led to a correspondence. He was very keen on develop- 
ing the industrial resources of Ireland, which at that time 
as now were indeed badly in need of developing. He wrote 
me from the Wicklow rectory where he was taking tem- 
porary duty, the incumbent of which was my husband's 
brother, although a good deal of water was to flow under 
the bridges before I became aware of any particular inter- 
est for me in that rectory or its inhabitants. 

Mr. Fagan was distressed at the waste of blackberries 
in the Wicklow hedges, as, indeed, well he might be. There 
was a time when the blackberry was disdained because it 
was common. The Department of Agriculture has taught 
the Irish something since those days, and a good deal of 
money comes to Ireland yearly now for the blackberry 
harvest, though not so much as might come. 

My friendship with Mr. Fagan led to a visit to England 
in 1884. I stayed some time at his Norfolk rectory. Great 
Cressingham, and spent a couple of months in London. It 
was my first real London visit, my first peep into the big 
world, for when I had visited England before, I had stayed 
at Aldershot with a relative and had only visited London 
for the theatres and shopping. 

I remember the very eve of my departure for London, 

[135] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

when I had been in Dublin and Miss Mulholland had come 
to the Kingsbridge station with me on my way home. She 
told me what pictures to see. The Winter Exhibition at 
one of the Galleries that year was a Rossetti Exhibition. 
Going down to Norfolk for some weeks, I missed the Winter 
Exhibitions, but I got to know my London pretty thor- 
oughly, and I met various interesting people, although, 
since I had only just begun to write I had not the key to 
the charmed circles which I held later. 

I was still very political at that time, and coming and 
going between Great Cressingham and London I managed 
to spend a good deal of time at the House of Commons. 
I became quite at home in the Ladies' Gallery, and heard 
many debates. 

English feeling against the Irish Nationalists was at that 
time very much inflamed by the dynamite outrages. I re- 
member wearing shamrock on St. Patrick's Day of that 
year in a London 'bus, and being eyed by the occupants 
with positive hatred. Of course it stirred up all one's patri- 
otic feeling, and at first the hostile atmosphere, the strange- 
ness too, perhaps, had the effect of making me very home- 
sick. I had travelled to London with Bee and Margaret 
Walshe on their way to join their brother John in Sydney. 
They stayed a few days in London, and I remember my 
loneliness when I lost them. We had parted at Euston, 
having arranged for a meeting next day. I spent all next 
day, which happened to be Saturday, looking for their hotel 
in Liverpool Street. There were six Liverpool Streets, and 
I visited five before I gave it up, and also tried various 
Liverpool Roads, Crescents, &c. The next day, Sunday, I 
was violently homesick. I went to see the baritone, William 
Ludwig, who was an old friend of my father's, and his 
singing of Irish melodies plunged me into an acute state 

[136] 



DISCURSIVE 

of loneliness, in which I dropped tears into my coffee cup. 
I wonder I did not go home the next day. 

However, next day the Walshes discovered me. They 
had mislaid my address, and, discovering it, they sent a 
messenger for me. How good the reunion with my friends 
was! I stayed at their hotel with them and accompanied 
them to Tilbury. I never saw Bee Walshe again. One 
rainy morning at Ealing, some time in the first year of 
this century, I awoke, and, doing my hair at the glass, I 
began to talk of Bee Walshe. I had not talked of her, or, 
perhaps, thought of her, for a long time, for our corre- 
spondence had dropped years before. I talked of her all 
the time I was dressing. On the breakfast table I found a 
letter saying she was dead. She was a charming woman, 
with her autumn-leaf hair and her little ivory-coloured face, 
like a crescent moon amid the masses of her hair ; and a truly 
heroic soul. 

I was not long left to loneliness in the English circle in 
which I found myself. I went almost immediately to Great 
Cressingham Rectory, where I found warm friendship and 
affection awaiting me. I stayed there several weeks. There 
was a large family of young people. They were all steeped 
in poetry. They had the artistic instinct. They painted and 
drew, and did all manner of things in a happy, effortless 
way that produced beautiful things with the greatest ease. 
Mr. Fagan was a Fellow of his College, Pembroke, Oxford. 
He was a fine classical scholar. Full of ancient learning, 
imaginative, poetic, he was wasted on the yokels. His 
frantic Irishism did not recommend him. It flavoured all 
he said and did. I remember when we drove behind his 
Irish mare — all he could possibly procure from Ireland came 
from Ireland — he used to shout Scottish ballads — "Sir Pat- 
rick Spens," 'The Bonny House o' Airlie," and such im- 

[ ^37 1 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

mortalities as he drove. I rather wonder they were Scottish. 
He would sometimes decline on a ballad of Davis, but I 
think his artistic conscience was too strong for his wild 
Irishism. He could not pretend that "Emmeline Talbot" 
was as good as "Sir Patrick Spens." He was one of that 
extreme type of Irish patriot that if he had been less lovable 
in himself he must have turned all about him rabidly anti- 
Irish. As it was, his children adored him, and were nearly 
always ready to accept his views of Ireland. I must some- 
times have disappointed him, for his idealisation of Ireland 
was complete. I was an Irish idyllist at that time, but even 
I could not go the length of believing that everything Irish 
was snow-white. To use the slang of the day before yester- 
day, one was apt to be "fed up" with Ireland at Great 
Cressingham Rectory. 

It was a very delightful experience to me to be absorbed 
into this life full of artistic feeling and energy. The 
Esthetic Movement, as to the mere follies of it, was on the 
wane, though it was but an outward symbol of the real 
renaissance of art that was to transform England out of 
its Victorian hideousness. All the young people of the 
gentler classes were caught in the wave of it. Poetry was 
in high repute. Everyone was wearing aesthetic garments 
and colours, adorning their houses with artistic draperies, 
with pictures and beaten copper and brass, all manner of 
things, according to their means, taste, and knowledge, that 
consorted with the movement. Everywhere about Great 
Cressingham Rectory were bits of painting and embroidery, 
angular damsels playing on musical instruments, maids in 
gardens, Botticelli angels. They may have been out of 
drawing — I do not know : but they were always right in 
colour and feeling, and they made the house beautiful. 

Mr. Fagan was a literary man as well as a parson, more 

[ 138 ] 



DISCURSIVE 

literary man than parson, and the house was full of books. 
Books overflowed out of all the living-rooms on to the halls 
and staircases. I read a deal of poetry there and was made 
much of for my own small achievement. 

A delightful family ! All good to look upon, sweet- 
natured, sweet-voiced, full of ideals and artistic impulses — 
absolutely unconventional. 

Clerical Norfolk was, I think, in those days of Bishop 
Pelham's old age, very unconventional, but not in the di- 
rection of the Fagans' unconventionality. A Fagan boy 
was in the Navy and quite unlike the rest of the family. 
He complained bitterly that a Phoenix Park murderer had 
borne the name of Fagan. It required a considerable amount 
of courage to proclaim oneself Irish in such a backwater 
as Norfolk was in those days. Indeed one breathed a hostile 
air outside certain artistic circles in London. Mr, Fagan 
shouted his Irishism from the housetops. He was writing 
it and putting his name to it everywhere he could get a 
hearing in England. The one other literary parson in 
Norfolk, Dr. Jessop, was at Scarning, some considerable 
distance away — and is there still happily. Mr. Fagan must 
have suffered from an isolation of the soul among his 
brother parsons in Norfolk, though I remember that he had a 
friendliness with a clerical McCarthy somewhere in the 
neighbourhood, who was a perpetual curate or something 
of the sort. To have an Irish name even was a passport 
to his affections. When the Liberal Government adopted 
a Home Rule policy Mr. Fagan took the Liberal Govern- 
ment to his heart, entertained Joseph Arch at Great 
Cressingham Rectory, and embarrassed his wife at least 
by his friendship with anybody and everybody who was 
a Home Ruler. Politics levelled everything with him. He 
could be as haughty as anybody where politics did not come 

[ 139 1 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

in : but he was apt to discover a natural gentleness in say 
the sweep, or the sweep's family, if they happened to be 
Home Rulers, still more if they happened to be Irish. Such 
enthusiasms for humanity or a cause are apt to be embar- 
rassing. I remember to have heard a sad tale of how Mr. 
Fagan, when he was Vicar of a Cornish parish, gave 
all the blankets in the house for a shipwrecked crew, leaving 
his family to face a cold winter blanketless. I used to pity 
his family — his wife and daughters especially, to whom all 
chiffons were closed that were not Irish in their origin. 
This limitation bound them to linens and Irish homespuns^ — 
in which I am bound to say they looked charming. 

In 1882 Mr. Fagan had contributed to the Graphic a 
series of interesting articles on his Irish experiences. I re- 
member one especially — "A Voluntary Corvee," which de- 
scribed the Wicklow farmers cutting Mr. Parnell's hay for 
him. This was an excellent piece of neighbourliness and 
quite as it should be: but a propos I am reminded of Mr. 
Parnell when he was asked if the Plan of Campaign was 
being generally followed. "I only know," he replied, "that 
my own tenants are obeying it faithfully." 

Later on in 1886, I think, Mr. Fagan was in the row at 
Woodford with Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. He was in Ireland with 
a commission from the Graphic to write descriptive letter- 
press to the drawings of one of their artists. Mr. Fagan 
got caught into the excitement, as the Graphic people 
thought he had no right to be, seeing that he was their com- 
missioner. Mr. Blunt was arrested and sentenced to three 
months' imprisonment in Galway Jail. I have a picture of 
him in his prison garb. Mr. Fagan was dragged off the 
Land Leagvie platform by the police and sustained an in- 
jury to his knee which caused him to limp a little till the 
day he died. 

[ 140] 




Lady Wilde 



Tane Barlow 



DISCURSIVE 

It was certainly very embarrassing for everyone, espe- 
cially for poor Mr. Locker of the Graphic; and Mr. Pagan's 
parishioners of the superior class — there were not many — 
looked at him more askance than ever, while the trend of 
his humbler parishioners towards the chapel on the hill be- 
came more marked than before. As for the reception of the 
news at Great Cressingham Rectory — I am rejoiced I was 
not there to see. 

Through this friendship with Mr. Fagan I got an insight 
I never should have had otherwise, into the tragedy of the 
country parson. Here was a man, a fellow of his Oxford 
College, a scholar, a poet, an artist, sensitive, impression- 
able, ardent. Imagine his getting up in the pulpit every 
Sunday to address a few yokels from the Boeotia of Eng- 
land! He was not understood nor beloved of his flock 
nor did he love it. Often he used to sigh for the Cornish 
Celts, with whom he had been happy. 

I remember when he came to Dublin on a visit and one 
made social engagements for him, that one could never be 
sure of him if he got into conversation with anyone who 
had the Irish cause at heart in any way. Well do I re- 
member the dreadfully long pauses when on our way to 
dine somewhere or other Mr. Fagan would discover that 
he wanted a new white tie or a pair of gloves or some- 
thing of the sort. There was a dreadful occasion when we 
were to dine at the house of Dr. Kenny, who was then a 
Member of Parliament. Mr. Fagan was leaving by the 
night boat and Mrs. Kenny had most kindly fixed the hour 
of dinner earlier, on that account. Of course Mr. Fagan 
had to get a white tie at Pim's in South Great George's 
Street. I waited in the brougham at the door. Time passed 
and he did not return. I grew impatient and went in search 
of him. He was not to be found anywhere. An obliging 

[141] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

head of a department had taken him into the cellars or up 
to the attics. Absorbed in the passion for Irish manufac- 
ture, Mr. Fagan never remembered his dinner engagement 
till we were already an hour late. Being in Ireland it mat- 
tered less, but as I have a curious English prejudice in 
favour of punctuality — something of a throwback — I had 
a bad quarter of an hour. Mr. Fagan had just time, after 
making his apologies, to eat his soup and depart for his 
boat. He was very penitent ; but he would do just the same 
thing the next time. 

By the way — perhaps there need be no throwback to 
account for my predisposition in favour of punctuality. Mr. 
Fagan, I believe, gave me my first and abiding lesson, and 
it was during that very first visit to London in 1884 that 
I learnt and never forgot it. I may say that though I have 
possessed several watches I have never possessed one which 
kept time, so that I have learnt to depend on my neighbour's 
watches — or the public clocks if I were in town : in the 
country at home I had the Angelus bell or the hooter from 
the Saggart Mills or the garden dial or the house clocks 
or something else. Moreover, I was twenty before I really 
"knew the clock." I only guessed at the minute hands. 
I had somehow grown up in this inexplicable ignorance, and 
as I would not reveal it to anyone I seemed like enough at 
one time to go through life without "knowing the clock." 
Similarly, before I knew my London I was always getting 
into the wrong trains. I used to wonder at the simplicity 
of other people in like case, who would shriek out that they 
were in the wrong train and set a whole carriage full of 
friendly and helpful people in the black night of the Un- 
derground to advising them on the best way of repairing 
their mistake. I, on the contrary, discovering that I was 
in the wrong train, would get out with an air of knowing 

[ 142 ] 



DISCURSIVE 

my way thoroughly, and take a hansom perhaps half-way 
across London in order to get somewhere in time. Above 
all things I dreaded the discovery that I had blmidered. 
I had the self-consciousness and suspicion of the Celt in 
contradistinction to the Anglo-Saxon effusiveness and con- 
fidence in its kind. 

On one May evening in 1884 we were on our way to 
dine with Dr. and Mrs. Rae at Kensington. Dr. Rae was 
the man who went in search of Franklin and brought home 
his relics. He was a charming old man, not unlike my dear 
Dr. Atkinson, married to a wife a great deal younger than 
himself, who, with her brilliant contrast of bright eyes and 
rose and white colour against beautiful white hair, looked 
the most charming picture of a lady in powder imaginable. 
Mrs. Rae was a grand-daughter of John Foster, the last 
Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and she and her 
sister, Miss Skeffington Thompson, were ardent Irish patri- 
ots. At that time they were watching over and tending a 
little Society at Southwark which had begun to teach the 
London Irish children Irish history, Irish poems, Irish 
songs and dances — ^the seed of the Irish Literary Society, 
and of a bigger growth, the Gaelic League. 

I left the time entirely to Mr. Fagan on that occasion, not 
having learnt his disregard for such trifles. Of course we 
were late for dinner, a fact of which I was happily unaware 
till after dinner, when I was enlightened by Mrs. A. M. 
Sullivan in the drawing-room. Apparently the host had 
been excessively impatient, and no wonder, and had shown 
his impatience. There was a rather large dinner-party. 
Mr. John Redmond was there with his Australian bride 
and Mr. Willie Redmond. Fortunately I was able to enjoy 
the dinner unaware of the dreadful thing that had happened. 
So far as I could ensure it, I was never again late for dinner. 

[143] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I had known Mr. John Redmond a little in the days of 
the Ladies' Land League. He was a very attractive young 
man in those days, and he had the gift of pleasant manners 
and a charming voice. He was very young, with still much 
of the charm of the boy about him, although he has not his 
brother's charm of an evergreen boyishness, which makes 
him so much beloved, and in the House of Commons used 
to excuse any indiscretion. The night of that dinner-party 
Mr. John Redmond recited after dinner and the recitation 
was "The Wreck of the Hesperus." At that time there 
was a good deal of the well-bred and agreeable schoolboy 
about him, as his choice of a recitation showed. But then 
and always the Redmonds held a high place in the public 
esteem. The feeling that a man is a gentleman goes a long 
way in Ireland. I cannot remember a single occasion on 
which either of the Redmonds has departed for a second 
from that lofty ideal. Even when Mr. Willie Redmond 
was rowdy in the House, the House loved him none the 
less, but rather the more. 

I leave Mr. Fagan for the present with the sin of un- 
punctuality to his account. It is a harmless though incon- 
venient foible, and while it is looked on askance in Eng- 
land, where even Irish people become punctual unless they 
live in an Irish colony, it is generic to the whole of Ireland. 

I remember a luncheon-party at the house of a very much 
beloved Irish M.P., to which Dora Sigerson (Mrs. Clement 
Shorter) and I were bidden. It was a somewhat important 
luncheon-party and the card said 1.30. To ensure a 
punctual arrival, we drove on an outside car across the 
town. The maid who opened the door to us at 1.25 eyed 
us reproachfully and mentioned that the mistress was lying 
down with the toothache. We were shown into the 
drawing-room, where a circle of friendly dogs jumped on 

[ 144] 



DISCURSIVE 

chairs and shook hands with us as though they were ac- 
customed to act as deputy hosts. In a few minutes another 
maid came in and proceeded to light the fire. We had time 
to ask ourselves if we had not come on the wrong day be- 
fore the lady of the house arrived at 2.30. The first guest 
after ourselves appeared at 2.45, and at 3 o'clock lunch 
began. 

I mentioned this afterwards to an Irish friend who had 
also learned the English punctuality. 

"That's nothing," she said, 'T was asked to dinner at 

7.45 the other night at a Judge's house in Square. As 

I went up the steps at 7.40 I met my hostess on the door- 
step. She had a parcel under her arm. She greeted me 
cordially. T just ran around to the butcher/ she said; 'the 
piece de resistance was not to my liking, so I changed it. 
Here it is going in under my arm." 

In those days — I will not say it is so now, for Ireland 
is much changed — a meal was never at any hour. It was 
always "when it is ready." 

A Cork friend told us once with pride that a certain 
Cork boat or train was the most punctual in Ireland or 
England. "It is so punctual," he said, "that it is often in 
ten minutes before its time and goes out ten minutes earlier 
than the scheduled time," which reminds me of a travelling 
friend of mine who arrived, depending on the train's late- 
ness, only to see it steaming out. "The train's very 
punctual, Mick," he said to the porter. "She is," said Mick. 
^'She's the punctuallest train in Ireland, an' a great incon- 
vaynience to the travellin' public." 



[145] 



CHAPTER XII 

FRIENDS OLD AND NEW 

The friendship formed in that first visit to London which 
was to remain as one of the permanent things of my life, 
was that with the Meynells, to whom dear Father Russell, 
dying as I write this, commended me. 

My first introduction to the Meynells was an odd one. 
Father Russell had written to me that I was to write to 
them and ask when I might come. I wrote my letter very 
carefully, and not approving it for some reason or other, 
when I had done three-fourths of it, cast it on one side. 
I wrote another letter, which I found several days later 
in my blotter: I had sent the unfinished, unsigned letter, 
much to the bewilderment of the recipients. 

Of course, that little error was soon set right, and I was 
welcomed to the kind and hospitable house in Phillimore 
Terrace, Kensington — the terrace which George III used 
to call Dishclout Terrace, because of the scroll above the 
doors. 

Of that first meeting with Wilfred Meynell I retain the 
impression of something young, brisk, and kind. Alice 
Meynell bewildered me with the fulfillment of my dreams 
of what a poet should look like. 

I have an impression of Mrs. Meynell — she was not very 
strong then, and she lay on a sofa — as a beautiful pale face, 
ivory as the crescent moon and lit by the most wonderful 
eyes, in masses of dark hair. I am sure there were pea- 
cocks' feathers about. The wall-paper, perhaps, had a de- 
sign of peacocks' feathers — perhaps not, for I think I see 
it a dull red, in that day of March twenty-eight years ago 
when I had tea with the Meynells for the first time. 

[146] 



FRIENDS OLD AND NEW 

I saw them several times during that visit. There was a 
day when I sat with a feverish little boy on my lap, very 
flattered that he would come to me, when Cardinal Man- 
ning's little brougham stopped at the gate, and that wonder- 
ful old man came in, wrapped in an overcoat with quilted 
facings against the weather. I suppose it must have been 
March weather, for we sat by the fire, Mrs. Meynell on her 
sofa, Wilfred talking and doing the Weekly Register, which 
he then edited, in between. The Cardinal did no more than 
speak to me, for the conversation seemed like to be con- 
fidential, and so I went away. 

One Saturday Miss Skeffington Thompson took me to 
see Lady Wilde, who at that time used to hold Saturday 
receptions at her house in Park Street, W. I remember 
that it amazed me to find a little house wedged in between 
another little house and a big public-house at the corner. 
I did not understand that Park Street, Grosvenor Square, 
W., was a place to live, even if one could not swing a cat 
in the rooms and the public-house was cheek by jowl with 
one. The first day I went there, there was a beauty of the 
hour present, Miss Craigie Halkett; and there was Miss 
Fortescue, the actress, just fresh from her breach of prom- 
ise case against Lord Garmoyle, and very much the fashion 
of the moment. 

Lady Wilde, in a white dress like a Druid priestess, her 
grey hair hanging down her back, received us in a couple 
of narrow London rooms, with open folding doors, in a 
gloom illumined only by a few red-shaded candles. All 
the blinds were down; and, coming in from the strong 
sun outside, the gloom was the more impenetrable. Lady 
Wilde shook hands with me and motioned me to a seat. 
I went in the direction she had indicated to me blindly. A 
soft hand took mine, and a soft voice spoke. "So fortu- 

[147] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

nate," said the voice, "that no one could suspect dear Lady- 
Wilde of being a practical joker ! There really is a chair." 
The soft hand drew me to it. I sat down by two sisters, 
who have remained with me all these years as soft voices, 
a rustle, a perfume, a low talk of poetry, a glimmer of 
charming faces in the dark. I never even knew who they 
were. They were passionately, intensely Irish. They had 
anticipated the Union of Hearts at its full tide. I cannot 
be sure of their names even : but ever afterwards when I 
received from some English parsonage, some English 
country-house, one of those letters which are amongst the 
compensations of life, letters full of the love of poetry and 
art, gentle, refined, sensitive, dreamy, I have given the writer 
the face and the voice of one or other of those two girls who 
murmured in the darkness at Lady Wilde's twenty-eight 
years ago. Of me they knew nothing, but they were pre- 
pared to take me to their hearts. They talked of Mary 
Robinson — still Mary Robinson — whose first slender volume 
of poems had just been published. One quoted — I quote 
from memory over all those years and may well misquote — 

"Across the gold-green heaven drifted 

Pale wandering souls that shun the light," 

and ended on a sigh of rapture. "It has entrain/' she said 
in her silken voice. 

These girls represented for me a lovely type of English 
girlhood. Perhaps it belonged to the Esthetic Movement 
and departed with it. I have not met just the same type 
in the twenty years of my English life. To be sure a good 
many of the twenty years belonged to the dark period in 
spiritual and intellectual things which spread over England 
like a pall, and seems to be breaking up now into a general 
unrest, with one knows not what of calamity behind. 

The few shaded candles at Lady Wilde's afternoons were 

[148] 




Oscar Wilde 



FRIENDS OLD AND NEW 

arranged so as to cast the limelight on the prominent people, 
leaving the spectators in darkness. Lady Wilde did not 
forget the spectators. She discovered one in the darkness to 
draw attention in a loud voice to the points of the exhibits. 
"Such a beautiful long neck !" she would say : or "Do you 
see the glint on her hair as she turns? I wish Oscar were 
here to see it." 

Presently came Oscar, and growing accustomed to the 
darkness one could see how like he was to the photographs 
of him which were all about the room, full-face, half-face, 
three-quarter face; full-length, half-length, three-quarter 
length; head only; in a fur coat; in a college gown; in 
ordinary clothes. He came and stood under the limelight 
so to speak^ in the centre of the room. There was some 
sort of divan or ottoman there on which Miss Fortescue 
and he sat for a while in conversation. The shaded light 
had been arranged so as to fall upon them. 

With him had come in the girl who was afterwards to 
have the irreparable misfortune to be his wife, poor pic- 
turesque pretty Constance Lloyd, dressed all in brown, a 
long brown cloak, a wide brown velvet hat with a plume. 
How charming it is in one's memory now that feminine 
fashions have reached the nadir of hideousness. She was 
a delicate charming creature, little fitted to endure the terri- 
ble fate that was to be hers. At the time, doubtless many 
people thought her fate enviable. 

One was brought up to Oscar and introduced. Then 
and always I found him pleasant, kind and interested. My 
impression of his looks was of an immense fat face, some- 
what pendulous cheeks, and a shock of dark hair, a little 
like the poet Bunthorne perhaps — a little also like Marat 
or Robespierre. I found nothing in him of the witty im- 
pertinence other people record him. I remember that Han- 

[ 149] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

nah Lynch' s introduction to him was in this way. Lady 
Wilde said : "This is Miss Hannah Lynch, Oscar : a young 
Irish genius." Oscar : "Are not young Irish geniuses as 
plentiful as blackberries?" 

Then, or perhaps on a later occasion, for I visited at 
Lady Wilde's up to the year 1889 — my last visit to London 
before my marriage took me to live there — one of the vis- 
itors was Mrs. Frank Leslie, the rich American whom 
Willie Wilde afterwards married. Willie was eclipsed by 
Oscar at that time; but he was as amusing, and quite as 
brilliant as Oscar, say the old family friends. He came 
out on the steps with us that first day and stood a while 
chaffing Dublin. He talked about Rathmines, which in his 
day was a more fashionable suburb of Dublin than it is now, 
asking if Dublin was still Dublin and Rathmines. 

An old friend of the Wildes told me the other day of 
an occasion on which Willie was asked to play the banjo. 
"Of course, I refused." "But why?" "Why not? I can't 
play the banjo." "Oh!" said the old friend, "but I ex- 
pected you to say you could." 

Willie Wilde married his rich American. She divorced 
him in a few years. His explanation was that she wanted 
him to work, and that he had said there were too many 
people working and too much work done in America already. 

I heard long afterwards that he had married a good little 
woman who nursed him in poverty and illness, and made 
his last years happy, or as happy as they could be. 

A girl who was present that first day at Lady Wilde's 
struck me dumb with admiration. She was a Miss Mary 
Potter, who afterwards was a public reciter under the name 
of Romola Tynte. She was very beautiful, and her straight, 
falling cloak of black plush, her wide black hat with a 
rose in it, seemed to me a garb for an aesthetic princess. 

[150] 



FRIENDS OLD AND NEW 

She talked, not to say chattered, a great deal ; and I can 
hear Lady Wilde saying: "My dear Miss Potter, you must 
not talk so much. Not with that face. You should be 
still — still and grave." 

Poor Wildes! My memory of them is entirely grateful. 
They were very kind to an obscure Irish versifier. Later 
on I contributed a series of articles to a magazine which 
Oscar edited for a time. It was, I think, the Woman's 
World, which did not last very long. It is one of the kind- 
nesses I owe to Oscar Wilde that he should have remem- 
bered and enrolled me among his contributors. 

I have been told that in the bitter days following his 
downfall, Oscar Wilde said that if his father had not for- 
bidden his becoming a Catholic while still in his teens, he 
would never have fallen as he did. It is interesting to re- 
member in this connection that his early poems when he 
was at Oxford were distributed between the Oxford Maga- 
zine and The Irish Monthly. I have the volumes of the 
latter containing the poems, strongly influenced by Tenny- 
son, which he was writing at that time. And after all, with 
all his sins behind him, the old Mother Church, who can 
forgive all sins in the name of her Head, took him and 
cradled him in peace. 

Other visits I paid at that time were to Sir Charles 
Russell's house in Harley Street, by kind favour of Father 
Russell and Miss Mulholland. I have memories of a very 
happy household, with boys and girls growing up, all will- 
ing and able to express their opinions about things in gen- 
eral, else they would not have been Russells. There was 
a refreshingly Irish air in that house, at a time when the 
atmosphere outside was very hostile. I do not think I 
met Sir Charles Russell that first time. My visits were at 
lunch or tea-time and he was tremendously busy just then. 

[151] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Lady Russell was engaged in fitting up his chambers in 
the Temple comfortably, so that he could have what rest 
he could take there when he was unable to get home. Mrs. 
A. M. Sullivan had kindly given a day to showing me about 
London. We ended up at A. M. Sullivan's chambers in 
the Temple, where Mr. Barry O'Brien came in, and I heard 
him talk of Sir Charles's rugs and comfortable chairs. 

Apropos of the hostile atmosphere in London just then 
owing to the dynamite explosions, I will tell a little bit of 
secret history as I have heard it. A certain American 
Fenian, whom I shall call Colonel G., met with and fasci- 
nated an old friend of my father's, one Peter Devey, a very 
quaint and interesting personality. Peter Devey had a great 
admiration for Colonel G. as one of the heroes of the Fenian 
days. And here I must differentiate between Fenian and 
Fenian — for the Clan-na-Gael in America, which was a 
sort of off-shoot of Fenianism, had altogether departed 
from the ways of legitimate Fenianism. I shall speak 
presently about John O'Leary, the old Fenian chief, and 
I will only say here that he was almost fanatically high- 
minded and clean-handed. He would have made war, but 
he would have abhorred murder : and expediency was to 
him only another name for lying and dishonesty. Colonel G. 
had departed a good way from the old Fenian counsels and 
belonged to the revolutionary American party, but he was 
still apparently the man he had been when Peter Devey 
encountered him on a visit to America and came home 
charged with a commission to buy old books largely for 
Colonel G., who was about to open a second-hand book- 
shop in St. Louis or Detroit — I forget which. Now Peter 
Devey was a somewhat weird choice as a book-buyer. He 
had a great taste for books and they were by the walls and 
all over the floors of the old house under the shadow of 



FRIENDS OLD AND NEW 

Dublin Castle, where he pursued his calling. He was a 
member of a Temperance Working Man's Club and was a 
great man at debates. Himself a brand snatched from the 
burning, he had swept into the temperance net various poetic 
cobblers and tailors who had found relief from the drab- 
ness of their calling in strong drink. It fell to my own lot 
to have my boots made by a cobbler, for no other reason 
than that he was a contributor to the Poets' Corner of the 
Nation. Both my father and Peter Devey could repeat the 
poetic effusions of these gentlemen by the yard, and at the 
age I was then it was somewhat thrilling to me to have 
my foot measured by a son of the Muses, even though the 
poetry — patriotic and temperate — made no strong appeal 
to me. 

Peter Devey was highly flattered by the commission from 
Colonel G. He went from one book-auction to another, 
my father occasionally lending a hand. From time to time 
the books were despatched. I know I had a fine time snatch- 
ing a reading of as many as I could before they were sent 
away. A great many books were bought and despatched 
before any doubts rose in Peter Devey's mind. I do not 
know how far the doubts had gone when Colonel G. dis- 
appeared mysteriously, leaving his debt still unpaid. After 
a time it was whispered that he had been blown up, hoist 
with his own petard, in the London Bridge explosion. 

By the way, in its proper place I should have spoken of 
Johnny Doyle and the debt my childhood owed him in the 
way of reading. Johnny Doyle was a "dairy-boy" in my 
father's employment for bodily sustenance, and a collector 
for spiritual ; as a Lord Mayor of Dublin may earn his 
living by being assistant-clerk to the Sub-Sheriff — boss to 
his boss. Johnny lived with his old wife and one daughter 
— a fair, shadowy, slip of a girl, like a very faint sweet-pea, 

[153I 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

who might somehow have sprung from one of the old ro- 
mances Johnny loved — in a roadside cottage which, as for- 
tune would have it, seemed especially suited to a book- 
collector. It was a cottage designed to have a second floor, 
but it had only the one, so there was a great expanse of 
smoke-browned walls reaching to the thatch, which were 
lined with Johnny's book-shelves. 

Mrs. Doyle used to say, when Johnny spent every penny 
he could lay hands upon on books, that men must always 
have their foolishness, and that his form of folly was better 
than the drink. As Johnny never drank, except at the well 
of literature undefiled, the home was a happy one. As a 
little girl of nine or ten, and later, Johnny Doyle's library 
was my delight. I owe to it my acquaintance with The 
Man of Feeling; Henry, Earl of Moreland; Miss Burney's 
Cecilia; The Arabian Nights; and various other delights. 
There was one dreadful book in which there was a deal 
about the sufferings of the children who worked in the 
mines in the spacious early days of Victoria. That and 
Uncle Tom's Cabin and Nicholas Nickleby because of 
Smike, left an abiding impression of misery on my mind. 
There was one special Oriental romance which Johnny al- 
ways promised to me as a reward for good behaviour. It 
was called A String of Pearls. Perhaps I never was good, 
or perhaps the String of Pearls was lost in the sooty gloom 
of Johnny's highest shelf, for I never read it. Fatherless 
Fanny was another of these delusive delights. Johnny was 
one of the collectors who buy for the sake of handling 
the volume, for he did not read himself, although I think 
he probably possessed a couple of thousand volumes. 

When I was at my Convent school the sweet-pea daughter 
died, and Johnny and her mother were so lonely that they 
drifted back to Dublin, taking the library with them, 

[ 154 ] 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE LADY IN BLACK 

Before I returned home from that visit to England, which 
lasted three months, I had a curious experience. What it 
meant, what its origin, I shall not venture to guess. I tell 
the thing as it happened to me. 

I was very young, very simple, very enthusiastic, 
crammed to the lips with patriotic ardours, but just as much 
in sympathy with dynamite as any English person. How- 
ever, the very charming lady in black silk, who sat by my 
side in the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons, and 
to whom I lent my opera glasses, on a certain sunny April 
afternoon of that year, 1884, pricked up her ears when I 
chattered enthusiastically about the Irish members — the 
more that they were in somewhat doubtful odour at the 
time — pointing out to her this and that hero of my youth- 
ful imagination. I knew most of the members of the Irish 
party at that time, just well enough to be able to preserve 
the proper amount of admiration. The black silk lady was 
at least as enthusiastically Irish as I. Her mother was an 
Irishwoman. Oddly enough she had never visited the 
adorable country. She had only just returned from India. 
But she was on the eve of visiting it : she only wanted a 
congenial companion and guide. Her husband and boy were 
English of the English. Her meeting with myself was 
providential. The Irish members were her heroes. She 
craned her neck to see even the most obscure member. Her 
meeting with me was professedly the event of her life. 

My English hostess of those days had been sitting listen- 
ing, with a rather mystified expression, to our rhapsodies. 

[155] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Presently the black silk lady directed the battery of her fasci- 
nations that way. She was a very charming black silk 
lady — petite, wi-th small, regular features, brown eyes, 
crisply waving brown hair, just slightly flecked with grey, 
little white teeth like a child's. Not more than thirty-five 
certainly. Beautifully dressed. The manner vivacious. 
My English hostess succumbed to the charmer as well as I. 
I had to leave early and my new friend was short-sighted, 
so short-sighted that she could not even hear without the 
aid of glasses. I besought her to keep mine through the 
sitting, and to return them to me at my hostess's house in 
North London. 

She came, and pleased equally on the second occasion. 
She was staying at the Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square. 
She invited us to dine and a theatre. The friendship grew. 
Presently my hostess dropped out of it and it was only I. 
The lady in black silk had conceived such an affection for 
me that existence was hardly possible without me. I was 
seized upon, taken possession of. I was incessantly lunch- 
ing, dining, theatre-going, driving, with my new friend. 
I could hardly be out of her sight for a few hours with- 
out letters and telegrams following on my track. She 
was very generous and showered small gifts on me : would 
have showered bigger ones, I think, if she had not been 
afraid of frightening me. She wore beautiful jewels. As 
though they were credentials she showed me her jewel-case 
one day — dazzling as a Bond Street jeweller's window. 
There was a name under the sunk handle of the jewel-case. 
She kept it turned carefully away from me, but somehow 
I saw it. I remember it to this day. It was a name in full : 
and it was not the name by which she was known to me. 

Oddly enough — for I am a grateful person — all these 
favours did not the least bit in the world win my heart. 

' [156] 



THE ADVENTURE OF THE LADY IN BLACK 

Truth to tell, the lady protested too much : she was in too 
great a hurry: she frightened me. As I sat by her side 
in hansoms or in stalls at the theatre, or feasted with her on 
the finest fare the Grand Hotel afforded, I was alarmed to 
the depths of a nature fundamentally timid and conven- 
tional, at all this intimacy with a stranger. I suspected 
no more than that she was an adventuress. The idea of a 
spy never remotely entered my mind. Why on earth should 
a spy be interested in me? I might just as well have asked 
why an adventuress should be, but I did not. Anyhow, 
the fear effectually prevented my introducing her to the 
Irish members and to various Irish friends of mine in Lon- 
don. If she had had patience she might have arrived at 
these things naturally. But she had not: and so she de- 
feated her own ends so far as I was concerned. 

She was not a good actress by any manner of means. She 
was always contradicting herself, professing at one mo- 
ment not to know London because of her long absence in 
India, at the next showing her knowledge of it. Once she 
displayed to my amazed eyes a copy of the dynamite organ 
which was at that time being published in America — an in- 
famous, ill-printed rag. She showed it to me as though on 
the edge of a confidence — that she belonged to the revolu- 
tionary party probably — and snatched it from my hands 
just when my first glance at it had revealed the loathesome- 
ness of its contents. She was disappointed when I ex- 
pressed my abhorrence of the dynamite propaganda; and 
after a pretended justification of it she dropped the matter. 

I had a glorious three weeks of it which I did not enjoy 
in the least. There were all sorts of mysterious things, 
sudden absences, telegrams arriving when we were at meals. 
Once after a theatre I stayed the night at the Grand Hotel, 
and she came in about breakfast time in out-door things 

[157] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

to my room to suggest breakfast in bed for me and a 
leisurely getting up, as she had to go out for a few hours. 
Once when I would have thanked her for some gift with a 
kiss she avoided the kiss. I really think she was only an 
amateur detective and spy after all, and very bad even for 
an amateur. Anyhow, she alarmed me so thoroughly that 
I flew back to Ireland from her gifts and entertainments 
some time before I need have gone — my ostensible reason 
that I had spoilt my best hat in the rain and must go home 
to get another. She tried to make me accept a hat from 
her, but I would not. Nor had I introduced her to a single 
one of those she desired to meet in London, although I 
took her to the houses of some of my non-Irish friends. 

I was hardly home before a telegram followed me. She 
was coming to Ireland, in the ardent expectation that I 
would be her guide and friend. She came, with her whole 
wardrobe of beautiful clothes, her jewels, her photographs 
of her husband and son and other little belongings with 
which she was wont to make a hotel-room home-like, also 
with her apparently limitless supply of money. Before I 
could answer her she came flying out to my country home 
on an outside car, claiming me as her own. She laid herself 
out to captivate my family. My father, who was at once 
the simplest and the most astute of men, refused to be capti- 
vated. She had a thin hard mouth, which was a blemish in 
her otherwise soft, round face. He was interested in her, 
but he refused to trust a woman with that mouth. 

I did not see very much of her after that. She had 
squeezed her orange and found nothing in it. I was but 
a means to an end. I lunched with her — one of my sisters 
being her guest also — at the Shelbourne Hotel, but she was 
prostrated with some ailment as a result of the Indian life 
and lay for a day or two with hot-water bottles to her back 

[158] 



THE ADVENTURE OF THE LADY IN BLACK 

on a sofa. Then there was the mysterious recall. She had 
to go and come between London and Dublin : again she had 
to attend a christening in Scotland. I was to expect her 
and be ready to come to her the minute she was free. 

One of those days when she was in Dublin and well there 
happened to be what was a great social function in the 
Dublin of that time — the College Races — i.e. the athletic 
sports of Dublin University. I had tickets and she came 
with me. In the College Park we ran up against the very 
man she wanted — an ex- Fenian Dublin journalist, who had 
served his time after '67 and died the other day a Member 
of Parliament. With my father's warning ringing in my 
ears, "Don't introduce her to any one," I tried in vain to 
avoid him. He simply would not be avoided. He admired 
the lady. He forced himself upon us; and the introduction 
was made. 

Meanwhile, after I had left her in London, she had called 
at the House of Commons, on a distinguished member of 
the Irish party, a somewhat difficult and unapproachable 
person. Representing herself as a great lover of Ireland, 
and using my name as an introduction, she succeeded in 

making friends with Mr. , but it did not go very far, 

though I believe he dined with her at her hotel and accepted 
a seat in her opera box. Probably she discovered that he 
had nothing to give her, as in my own case. I am bound 
to say that I believe she was perfectly discreet in her be- 
haviour. She used her fine clothes, her jewels, her bright 
eyes and snowy shoulders, as so many weapons in her 
armoury, but I imagine she used them with reluctance, with 
something of disgust that she must so use them. I can 
quite well believe that at the back of her adventure there 
may have been some real honest hatred of us all, as enemies 
or potential enemies of her country. 

[159] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

However, with the achievement of making the ex- 
Fenian's acquaintance I had served her purpose and was 
incontinently dropped. He walked home with her to her 
hotel, received her the next day in the dingy newspaper 
office, where she must have been a dazzling little presence. 
Henceforth the dinners, the lunches, the entertainments 
generally, were for him. She hurled her friendship at his 
head as eagerly as she had hurled it at mine. He was a 
soft-hearted Irishman, susceptible to beauty and charm, 
though irreproachable in the domestic relations. Doubt- 
less she dazzled him. I had warned him that I knew nothing 
whatever about her. She put out all her pretty wiles to 
dazzle him and perhaps she succeeded for a time. But she 
made the running too fast, as she had done with me. His 
suspicions were excited. Waiting for her one day in the 
sitting-room of her Dublin hotel, while she hatted and 
cloaked for some expedition or other, he picked up from 
under the grate a handful or two of minutely torn papers. 
At his leisure, later, he was able to construct out of some 
of them a telegram — I shall not say from whom, but it 
was from a very well-known public man — a cypher tele- 
gram, only the name of the sender not in cypher. 

As a result, he and some other frolicsome persons whom 
he had introduced to her as dynamitards, planned her recep- 
tion into a secret society, where she was to be sworn in on 
a sod of turf which she was to be told was dynamite. She 
was prepared to swallow anything or almost anything : and 
they were prepared to supply her with all she could swallow. 
However, a prudent friend intervened before the great occa- 
sion came off. It was time to be done with her. A para- 
graph in a Dublin newspaper sent her flying in the wildest 
haste and that was the end of it. 

[i6o] 





Emily Skeffington Thompson 



Rev. Henry Stuart Fag an 





Charles Gregory Fagan 



Mrs. Alice Meynell 



CHAPTER XIV 

ANNUS MIRABILIS 

In 1885 some of my most important happenings came about. 
I published my first book, Louise de la Valliere, and I made 
some friendships of great worth to me in one way or 
another. 

Wilfred Meynell was the intermediary with Messrs. 
Kegan, Paul & Co., who were then the poets' publishers, 
with regard to my first publication. The publishers dealt 
with me handsomely, considering that I was a young un- 
known person. For the sum of £20 they agreed to publish 
me. I remember clearly the day I received this proposal. 
I suppose it would be some time in the spring of that year, 
for the book came out in the summer. My father had come 
into the kitchen as he used to from the farmyard on which 
it opened. He had sat down a little wearily in front of the 
roaring fire of coke, which used to send out a furnace-like 
heat. There I sought and found him, the dogs lying about 
his feet, with my fateful letter. 

I was not certain how he would take it. He had been 
hard hit by his army-contracts and there had been bad years. 
His answer was, when he had heard the letter read;, to put 
his hand to his pocket for his cheque book, ask for a pen 
and ink and write the cheque for the £20. He was always 
royally generous. No wonder people thought him a rich 
man, when he was no such thing. 

The little book came out in June of that year. It must 
have been a very propitious moment, for it had such a re- 
ception as, I believe, no little book of the same worth could 
hope to have to-day. It was reviewed quite respectfully by 

[161] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the London literary papers, by the London dailies, and the 
big provincial newspapers. Sometimes I was helped. 
Sometimes I was not. People will always help a young 
writer in Ireland. It is when you begin to grow independ- 
ent that they have doubts, 

I believe that before the book made its appearance I had 
met Willie Yeats. Some time in the spring of 1885 I had 
a letter from Mr. Charles Hubert Oldham, a young Trinity 
College man, who was about to start the Dublin University 
Review, asking me to help him. Such a request gave me 
great pleasure in those days. I contributed a poem to an 
early number, after which Mr. Oldham came to see me and 
told me about Willie Yeats and his father, showing me the 
Island of Statues, Willie Yeats's first considerable poem, 
which he had acquired for the new magazine. Presently 
Mr. Oldham came to see me accompanied by Willie Yeats. 
I can remember very well coming into the drawing-room 
at my old home, which was always filled with a dim green 
light from the creepers about the windows and the little 
half-glass door which led into the garden under an arch 
of boughs — and finding the two young men sitting in the 
bow window. 

Two more unlike could hardly be imagined. Mr. Old- 
ham, now Professor Oldham of the National University, 
would probably at that time have placed practicality first 
of the virtues. He had a very brusque, downright man- 
ner, not at all Irish. I remember his greeting of me on 
our first meeting after a little correspondence had passed. 
"Well, Miss Tynan, I'm starting this new magazine and 
I've come to see you because I think you may be of use 
to me." I don't think that very bald statement represented 
his real feelings at all : nevertheless it took me aback. Very 
honest, very direct, he would have said he had no time to 

[162] 



ANNUS MIRABILIS 

cultivate the graces ; yet I think there must have been more 
than a streak of the ideahst in the Trinity student who as 
long ago as 1885 found the way to the National idea. Many 
Englishmen and women of note will remember Mr. Old- 
ham as the presiding genius of the Contemporary Club, 
which had its meeting-place in his rooms at the corner of 
Grafton Street and College Green. The Contemporary 
Club has received notable visitors to Dublin for many years 
now. There used to be a Ladies' Night on Saturdays. 
The habitues in the days I remember included many men of 
diverse shades of opinion, in religion, politics, and all else. 
There used to be John O'Leary, the old Fenian Chief, Dr. 

Sigerson, Mr. , now the Right Honourable , W. F. 

Bailey, Mr. , now the Right Honourable , 

"Tommy" O'Shaughnessy, Recorder of Dublin, Mr. W. F. 
Crook, the Rev. H. S. Lunn, Douglas Hyde, Standish 
O'Grady, T. W. Rolleston, and others. 

All celebrities who came to Dublin were caught into Mr. 
Oldham's net and entertained at the Contemporary Club. 
Once it was Mrs. Humphry Ward, and Mr. Oldham startled 
the gathering by taking his place on the hearth-rug and 
opening the discussion with : "Will you give us your views 
on religion, Mrs. Ward? I understand you are something 
of an agnostic." I do not think Mrs. Humphry Ward gave 
her views; but other people did and very sorely troubled 
the minds of some orthodox Catholics who were present. 

I occasionally went to a Ladies' Night at the Contem- 
porary Club and found the proceedings dull. I doubt that 
your true Irish ever take kindly to the debating society 
unless he or she is taking a hand. The Englishman likes 
to sit and have his mind improved. The Irish want to im- 
prove other people's minds. 

They discussed dull subjects to my mind. The energy 

[ 163 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

of their secretary carried them with it and Mr. Oldham's 
subject was economics. I was not the only young woman 
who was bored. Once I won the heartfelt gratitude of the 
others by looking so obviously bored that Mr. Oldham, 
who was truly good-natured, swooped down on me and 
asked me if I would not like to play billiards upstairs. 
What a joyful trooping upstairs there was of those boys 
and girls who were unworthy of the profundities of the 
Contemporary Club. 

Few men can have accomplished as much as Mr. Oldham. 
It is only when one gets down to the frozen facts of writing 
that one discovers it. To create the Contemporary Club 
and keep it going for nearly thirty years, to found the 
Protestant Home Rule Association, which certainly served 
its purpose, to found and keep going a magazine which 
reached a very high standard. These are no small achieve- 
ments : and one might say that Mr. Oldham did the things 
alone. He certainly had no help from Trinity College for 
the magazine to which he gave its name. The University 
who was a stony stepmother to her greatest sons when their 
achievements were other than academic, looked askance at 
a magazine which appealed to a general audience, while 
calling itself the Dublin University Review, and moreover 
had a distinct taint of Nationalism. Trinity College, which 
has produced great scholars, has discouraged the imagina- 
tive energy in her students, though it has broken out in 
spite of discouragement. A few volumes of thin Tenny- 
sonian verse is all that has come from Trinity in modern 
times, in the way of imaginative work. When she has 
unwillingly mothered some one whose work is to count out- 
side the domain of scholarship, that person is usually to be 
found in rebellion. 

Trinity College, looking askance at Mr. Oldham across 

[164] 



ANNUS MIRABILIS 

College Green, had her revenge. The magazine, most cred- 
itably produced and brilliantly written, had, I suppose, no 
monetary success. It was, of course, too good to be popu- 
lar. Oddly enough it fell in doing something a don might 
have approved of. A too free translation of a pastoral of 
Anacreon by Dr. Keningale Cook, set Dublin to hiding its 
face in horror. Ireland of that day was very prudish. I 
admit that Dr. Keningale Cook's translation was not for 
the home. Perhaps Mr. Oldham published it as a sort of 
suicide. Perhaps it was Mr. Rolleston, who, I think, acted 
as editor at the time, who was responsible for the indis- 
cretion. In any case, the Reviezv perished, and Dublin Uni- 
versity was once again plunged into its academic seclusion, 
free of an association to the casual mind with a world 
it hates. 

Willie Yeats was at that time of our first meeting twenty 
years old. He was tall and lanky, and his face was as you 
see it in that boyish portrait of him by his father in the 
Municipal Art Gallery, which Sir Hugh Lane has bestowed 
on Dublin, a truly great gift which it is to be hoped Dublin 
appreciates. At that time he was all dreams and all gentle- 
ness. The combative tendencies came to him later : such 
things are apt to develop in Ireland if one is a maker, as 
they used to call the creative artist long ago. The Irish 
are quaintly Conservative. There are many shibboleths. 
Dublin, at least, has not many admirations, or it bestows 
them wrongly. Willie Yeats has had to fight his corner 
and fight it hard since those days. If he has learnt to hit 
back who shall blame him? 

He must have suffered all through his youth from being 
unlike his fellows : a white blackbird among the others, a 
genius among the commonplace. Probably the Anglo-Irish 
milieu in which he grew up was the least sympathetic he 

[165] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

could have found. The Anglo-Irishman, although he 
achieves great things at times, is, in the rank and file of 
him, somewhat harsh. He has the John Bullish attitude 
towards sentimentality without the real sentiment which 
John Bull is unaware of possessing, although it jumps to 
the eye of everyone else. He has somewhat of the Celt's 
irritability and jealousy : in fact, these things grafted upon 
him make for an intolerance which is far from being Celtic. 

Being so unlike his fellows, Willie Yeats was bound to 
suffer at school and afterwards. It is not in the ordinary 
schoolboy to take off his hat to a poet — even to one who is 
to help to make his age illustrious. He had a schoolmaster 
in his Dublin days who wrote very bad and very pretentious 
verse himself. It had received the suffrages of the critics 
of that day who acclaimed Lewis Morris as a great poet. 
He liked to ridicule the young poet because of whom he 
may one day be remembered. The schoolboys grinned at 
the poet's halting translations. If ragging, in its material 
sense, had been the fashion at Irish schools, it would have 
been harder for him. As it was — well, I daresay he had 
some consciousness of genius; and he had his dreams to 
interpose between him and the rough ■ schoolboy world. 

Certainly he had not a trace of bitterness when I first 
knew him, nor for long afterwards. He was beautiful to 
look at with his dark face, its touch of vivid colouring, the 
night-black hair, the eager dark eyes. He wore a queer 
little beard in those days. It was just a little later than his 
father's portrait of him, and he lived, breathed, ate, drank, 
and slept poetry. 

I have been scolding the schoolboys ; but I must acknowl- 
edge that in those days we all bullied Willie Yeats, I my- 
self not excepted. I believe it was because zve did not want 
to live, breathe, eat, drink, and sleep poetry : and he would 

[i66] 



ANNUS MIRABILIS 

have you do all those things if you allowed him. But then 
and always I knew that he was that precious thing to the 
race and the world, a genius. • Driving Willie Yeats to and 
fro, I used to say to myself : 

"And did you once see Shelley plain?" 

All this, however, comes somewhat later. Louise de la 
Valliere appeared in June, 1895. It was made a commer- 
cial success by my friends immediately. Since the book 
belonged to me a great many of them dealt with me for it. 
Count Plunkett sent me £5 for copies, and Father Russell 
also sent me a cheque. I very soon got back the £20 and 
more : but my father never asked for a red cent of it. He 
derived such an immense pleasure from my success that I 
am sure he thought it cheap at the price. 

The fruits of that little first volume came rapidly. One 
of the first fruits was a friendship, which sweetened and 
brightened my life for twenty years, with Mary Gill, who 
died in 1905 — a dark year for me, since that year also took 
from me my beloved father. 

Father Russell sent the little book to Cardinal Newman, 
who wrote me a characteristic blessing on "compositions 
which he has found as pleasant to read as excellent in spirit 
and tone." 

I take up a little black-covered note-book into which I 
pasted some of my memorable letters — a quite unworthy 
habitation for them — and I look at those letters, mostly from 
dead hands, alas. In those days all young poets used to 
send their volumes to Tennyson, with a touching confidence 
which might have, but did not not, allay the poet's bitter- 
ness. Now I, with my London experience, was wiser. I 
sent my book only to such of the illustrious and remarkable 
people as I had some reason to believe would be interested 
in me and my doings : and I was more than justified. 

[167] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Here is Cardinal Manning's letter, and the date of it 
tells me that the poems were published in May, not in June. 
Indeed a letter from Mrs. Meynell bears date May 7th, so 
that the book must have come early in May, or perhaps late 
in April: 

Archbishop's House, Westminster, S. W., 
May 29, 1885. 

Dear Miss Tynan, — Your volume of Poems reached me 
last night, and I at once read many of them with very great 
interest and pleasure. The least excellence in them is their 
very pure diction. I am no critic, but I am very quick to 
feel words without meaning or colour or fitness. I have 
seldom read so much and met with so few words I did not 
think well chosen. 

The next excellence seems to be the beauty of conception, 
natural and moral. 

But the last and highest is the sacredness of the subjects 
and the piety of their treatment. It is not therefore so 
much as poems, but as sacred strains of which the Passion 
of our Lord is the centre, that I value them. 

I hope, if you come again to London, that I may see you. 
I hope that all blessings may be with you. — Believe me al- 
ways, yours faithfully in J. C. 

Henry E., Card. Archbishop. 

A letter from Sir Samuel Ferguson may be interesting 
to others than myself because of the political touch in it. 
Sir Samuel had been in sympathy with the '48 men. His 
"Lament for Thomas Davis" is one of the finest poems in 
Anglo-Irish literature. Like a good many others, he was 
repelled by the Land League, not only by its doings, but 
by its methods, which were American rather than Irish. 

[168] 



ANNUS MIRABILIS 

20 North Great George's Street, 
June 6, 1885. 
Dear Miss Tynan, — The poems are full of feeling and 
refinement. I have read them with emotion and pleasure. 
They are of a higher mood than any I have hitherto seen 
having the same aims, and ought to make your voice in- 
fluential among the better spirits of that section of our coun- 
trymen with whom you sympathise. You will, I think, be 
stronger in proportion as you are more direct, and avoid 
the using of what may be called pet words. — I am, yours 
sincerely. 

Samuel Ferguson. 

PS. — I am greatly taken with your bird in the frosty 
branch. You are very happy in your bird imagery and 
sympathies. 

Years afterwards. Lady Ferguson, writing to me about 
a newspaper article of mine on her husband, returned again 
to his liking for that little poem about the bird on the 
frosty branch. 

I turn over my book of letters and I come upon a long 
letter from Mr. T. M. Healy in the bad typescript of those 
early days of type-writing. A very kind and pleasant letter 
it is, full of helpful suggestions. It is odd enough to read 
that he wished to write to me about my poem on A. M. 
Sullivan, only that, being a stranger, he feared that a letter 
would be intrusive, not to say impertinent. He suggests 
sending slips of my reviews which he may show to Mr. 
Labouchere, to secure a good notice in Truth, and promises 
to speak to Justin Huntley McCarthy, so that the Daily 
Nezvs may give a helping hand. He helped me in many 
other places besides. Through him Sir Edward Russell 
wrote a very kind review of me in the Liverpool Post. We 

[169] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

used to say in those days that Tim Healy was a good friend 
and a bad enemy. I remember when his face, with its 
bright brown eyes, its odd whiteness of skin and blackness 
of hair and beard, was a very pleasant thing in my sight — 
a friend's face, warm and kind. Some years later I was 
obliged to hate him, when he, more than any other, em- 
bittered the last months of the leader I adored. But what 
is done is done: and I am glad to record here Mr. Tim 
Healy's great kindness to me. Somewhere I have a little 
book he gave me, A Plea for Ireland, which was dear to 
me in its time. 

This friend log-rolled for me cheerfully and unashamed. 
But I don't think that a great deal of log-rolling went to the 
making of those excellent reviews, incredibly good it seems 
to me looking back on the very-much-derived little volume. 

Sometime in that summer I had the idea of sending the 
book to William Rossetti, for no better reason than that 
I had a passion for D. G. Rossetti's poetry and could now 
never hope to tell him so in this world. 

I remember perfectly the August Sunday on which the 
acknowledgment came. It was a beautiful bright summer 
Sunday. My memory of Sundays in my old home is of an 
incessant brightness. We used to rise early for the early 
Mass, and after breakfast there was a whirlwind of prepa- 
ration for the visitors who came to the big mid-day meal, 
the other visitors who came in the afternoon and evening. 
I believe my own occupation on those summer Sunday 
forenoons must have consisted largely of picking peas and 
shelling them. I can see the cool brightness of the cottage 
under its thatch, as I went through its rooms set in Indian 
file, with a tiny hall like an oblong box dropped in the 
middle of the rooms, to the garden. At the other end the 
garden was enclosed by an old privet hedge seven or eight 

[170] 



ANNUS MIRABILIS 

feet high and some three or four feet thick. There was a 
stone seat which went back into the hedge. There I sat and 
shelled peas, the scent of the privet all about me — looking 
away through the twisted apple boughs to the white gable 
of the house, the sound of distant church-bells and the 
moan of the wood-doves in my ears. In the Irish summer 
country you have always the wood-doves, as it might be the 
lamenting voice of the Spirit of Ireland. 

On such a summer morning William Rossetti's letter 
came. I remember how I could hardly take in its con- 
tents fast enough, and how I looked for my father to read 
the letter to him : I don't think anyone else was particu- 
larly interested in these triumphs of mine — of my own fam- 
ily, I mean. 

The letter ran: 

5 Endsleigh Gardens, London, N. W., 
gth of August, 1885. 
Dear Madam, — I received your letter of 5th of August 
and read it, needless to say, with very great interest and 
pleasure. The volume of poems came about the same time. 
I opened it, I confess, with some trepidation, fearing lest it 
might turn out that the poems were not of such calibre as 
to enhance or sustain the interest excited by the letter. The 
first poem which I read was the "Flight of the Wild Geese," 
followed by several others, say a good third of the volume. 

Here follow some compliments which my readers will 
take as read. The letter proceeds : 

The volume appears to me on the whole to be more in- 
dicative of an influence from my sister's work than my 
brother's. ... I mentioned the matter to my sister yester- 
day, reading her your letter, and assured her that if she 
were to receive a copy of the book from you she would 

[171] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

heartily like some things in it. This she is quite prepared 
to assume, and if you are still inclined to send her a copy, 
pray do so. Her address is 30 Torrington Square, Lon- 
don, W.C. We, and also our aged mother, still with us 
at the age of eighty-five, are very much interested in your 
feeling for Gabriel and grateful for it. 

I should like you, my dear Miss Tynan, to select from the 
enclosed list of photographs of my brother's pictures any 
half-dozen that you would particularly like to possess, and 
I shall then do myself the pleasure of ordering them for 
you. I have put an ink-mark against those which would, 
I fancy, on one ground or another, more specially merit 
your liking, but this is, of course, mere guesswork and you 
will choose as you prefer. I also enclose autographs of my 
brother and sister on the chance of your caring for such 
relics. — Please to believe me, very sincerely yours. 

W. M. ROSSETTI. 

It can be believed how I tossed my cap in the air over this 
letter, and how I went "touchin' the ground in an odd 
place," as the apple-woman said of the old parson who was 
about to be married. 

The Hollyer photographs of the pictures which I selected 
were : "Dante's Dream," "Prosperpine," "The Girlhood of 
Mary," ''Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the 
Pharisee," the two heads of Mrs. Rossetti and Christina, 
and a photograph of Gabriel, as his own family always 
called him. 

A little later I heard from Christina : 

30 Torrington Square, London, W.C, 
igth of August, 1885. 
My dear Miss Tynan, — I think you will forgive the 
delay which has preceded my grateful acknowledgment of 

[ 172] 



ANNUS MIRABILIS 

Louise de la Vallicre when I tell you it was occasioned 
by my wish to read it before writing to you. Now, having 
done so, I can express my sincere admiration for your poetic 
gift. But beyond all gifts I account graces, and therefore 
the piety of your work fills me with hopes far beyond any 
to be raised by music of diction. If you have honoured 
my form by thinking it worth imitating, much more may 
I your spirit. 

I think you would have been charmed by our dear Gabriel 
had you known him : so many were charmed and so many 
still remember him. My brother William, I know, is send- 
ing you his photograph, and I am sending you my last 
little book. Time Flies. Please accept it as a small response 
to your kind overtures. I have ventured to write in it 
your name without the formality of "Miss," an omission 
I like towards myself often, so I hope you will not dislike 
it. — Believe me to remain, very truly yours. 

Christina G. Rossetti. 

Turning the letters over again I come upon a letter from 
Michael Davitt telling me that John O'Leary, whom I did 
not then know, had praised the little book — too generously 
— adding from himself with other kind things : "I have 
had the extraordinary pleasure of saying when I heard 
the poems praised, 'And she is a friend of mine.' " 

Again, I find a letter from Miss Parnell, which I quote 
because of the personality of this mysterious and fascinating 
wom.an rather than for anything it says. I make no apology 
for the opinion it expresses, nor do I feel any lack of mod- 
esty in quoting it. It only means that Miss Parnell had 
a personal preference, probably largely generous, for my 
very minor muse over that of Mrs. Browning. Irish peo- 
ple have a trick of over-statement, at which one ceases to 
wince as one grows older. 

[173] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

^ Hume Street, Dublin, 
August 9. 

My dear Miss Tynan, — As I have not yet thanked you 
for your kind present of your poems, allow me to do so 
now and at the same time to congratulate you on your last 
in the Dublin University Review, all the more for the subject 
being so threadbare, as that makes your great success in 
dealing with it more conspicuous. I lent your book to a 
lady who is a great student of poetry but is too poor to 
buy it (I notice that it is the poor generally who like poetry 
best), and she agreed with my opinion that it was as good 
as Mrs. Browning, Hoping that you may continue to 
succeed and throw a reflected glory on your country and 
friends. — I remain, yours very truly. 

A. Parnell. 

I quote these letters from a great number of others ; and 
turning over my black book I marvel at the kindness which 
so encouraged a young writer. It was a time when we were 
much nearer to poetry than in these days, when a book of 
the kind would have met with a much chillier reception. 
I hold all those kind friends, living and dead, and in espe- 
cial Mr. William Rossetti, in warm and grateful memory. 



[174] 



CHAPTER XV 

THE ROSSETTIS AND OTHERS 

I RECEIVED William Rossetti's letter, one of the happiest 
things of my life, on the morning of the 9th of August, and 
my joy was unclouded by any warning that on the previous 
day, a very dear friend of mine, that son of Mr. Pagan's 
of whom I have spoken as writing poetry, had died in India. 

I do not know how long it took for the news to reach 
me. I believe it was September before I knew, and that 
month of August, with my sheaves coming in to me, was a 
happy one. 

Charles Gregory Pagan was a strange and interesting 
personality. In his sensitive face his eyes burned like blue 
fire. He was full of poetry and all manner of artistic im- 
pulses. At Oxford he had accomplished much less than 
was hoped for, because of some unrest and trouble in him 
that forbade his ever being prosperous or comfortable. He 
had his knot of admirers at Oxford. The Universities at 
that time still read poetry, and were under the influence 
of the glorious days when Morris and Rossetti and Burne- 
Jones influenced Oxford life. Walter Pater was yet a 
living force in Oxford, and the City of Lost Causes yet 
saw the world through the flame and the glory of poetry 
and imagination, when Oxford loomed to her lovers "like 
a ceremonial chapel filled with music." Instead of taking a 
Double-Pirst as was prophesied of him, he took a very ordi- 
nary degree, and coming down from Oxford he went into the 
Post Ofiice as a first division clerk, while waiting for some- 
thing more congenial to turn up. Of a life which might 
have been tranquil, he made storm and stress. He was 

[175] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

overwrought and too much unHke the pushing thronging 
world to be at his ease in it. He was always drawing or 
painting or Avriting poems or sketches or playing the piano 
or worshipping at the shrine of beauty. The blue fire of 
his eyes looked at you and looked away. He was like the 
Pre-Destined in Maeterlinck's lovely and solemn essay. He 
carried about with him the secret that he was to die young. 

I remember him in an old room in Clifford's Inn, oak- 
panelled, dim, with low windows looking on green branches 
in a far-away spring. The room was beautiful, not only by 
reason of its age, but for the colours that glowed in it. 
Panels of beautiful Morris blue, a portiere of the same, 
silver cups and vases everywhere, for unexpectedly he had 
been a great athlete at Oxford. Pictures on the walls; 
daffodils and wall-flowers in silver cups. Books on the 
floor, on the chairs, in the window-seats: a beautiful girl's 
head with straight, unsmiling lips, and a swan-like neck — 
the same face over and over looking out of shadowy corners. 
He had foreseen that face before he caught sight of it 
living at a London railway station. Strangely enough one 
finds it in his boyish water-colours, in the minute pen-and- 
ink drawings of his Oxford days, years before he knew the 
owner of the face. He was possessed by a passion for 
beauty, more perhaps than a passion for any mortal woman : 
and one is tolerably certain that he could not have lived 
and been happy and striving and fretted in the common 
human way. He was of the Pre-Destined. 

I came to know him well, and to be in his secrets during 
that visit of mine to London in 1884. Sometime in that 
autumn he went out to take over the head-mastership of 
the Kerala Vidya Sala College for native students at Cali- 
cut Malabar. He went out with all sorts of prepossessions 
in favour of the natives, with fine Quixote ideas of treat- 

[176] 




Lord Russell of Killowen 



x 



THE ROSSETTIS AND OTHERS 

ing them as men and brothers. He threw himself into the 
work of the College with passionate ardour. Whether he 
would have discarded those ideals in time, as many Eu- 
ropeans have done before him, none can say. He died nine 
months after going out with all his ideals yet in him, at 
the age of twenty-five. 

Not much of what he had done and promised to do re- 
mains. There were some books of his manuscript poetry, 
all under the shadow of early death. His pictures were all 
over the Great Cressingham Rectory, and his mother had 
a collection of his drawings of birds, while he was yet a 
baby, minutely and delicately observed. Somewhere I have 
a drawing of a missel-thrush signed by his mother, "Charlie, 
Aged Six" : and I have a couple of his pen-and-ink 
sketches and a little water-colour. One or two of his poems 
appeared in the Dublin University Review, and I find in 
his copy of Shelley a poem which appeared in the Academy. 
The Pagans had all been born and brought up in Cornwall, 
and Cornwall was very dear to them. I do not think any 
of them ever took to Norfolk. This poem has its Cornish 
inspiration : 

CARN GLUZE (the Grey Rock) 

Grey stones and there be many such hereby, 

Only a mouldering wall of granite grey; 
Yet once we came here, sweetheart, you and I, 

In an old world, it seems so far away. 

In some old world so far away it seems, 
I scarce can think it was the same, so far 

The memory of half- forgotten dreams 
Is not so faint as those lost summers are. 

Yet not -a single stone has changed his face. 
The tinkling rivulet has the self-same tune; 

And the old shadow fills the self-same place, 
Here in this dreamy golden afternoon. 

[ 177] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

And on the summer days the hushed uproar 
Of the wave's wash comes faint and far away. 

The white sea-fowl are wheeHng by the shore, 
The same that we saw once upon a day. 

Well, you are dead, and I am here alone. 

Time bringeth change to us as years roll on; 
There is no pity in this hard grey stone. 

He will be just the same when I am gone. 

He was a type belonging to the Oxford of that day. I 
remember his father saying once that he reminded him of 
the young men in Turgenieff, full of ideals and aspirations 
never to be realised. A curious type — feminine on the one 
side, on the other masculine in his love for sport, his 
achievements in all manner of games, some of them an 
Oxford tale, a country tale perhaps. I read the naive 
tributes of his native masters and pupils : "A gallant rider, 
an expert cricketer, a master of tennis, badminton, foot- 
ball, and every other sort of outdoor exercise, he was be- 
sides the fleetest of foot, the clearer of the highest point 
in the high jump, the largest space in the long jump." 

What he might have done if he had lived none can say. 
He flung away his life carelessly, playing cricket in tropic 
heat, and then lying on the ground as the damps of evening 
began to fall. Like Keats, whom he loved, — I can always 
hear him reciting in his singing way — 

"Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget 

What thou amongst the leaves hast never known — 
The weariness, the fever and the fret 

Here where men sit and hear each other moan. 
Where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs. 

Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies, 
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 

And leaden-eyed despairs. 

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. 
Nor new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow." 

His name is writ in water. 

[178] 



THE ROSSETTIS AND OTHERS 

His death brought me to England unexpectedly, in the 
autumn of that year, for I went on a visit to his parents to 
comfort them in what must have been the winter of their 
discontent. I went in October and stayed with them till 
late in November, when I went up to London and paid 
various visits to London friends, and to some in the country. 

I must have spent my Christmas in London that year, 
although I remember nothing at all about the Festival. 
Miss Mulholland was in London that autumn, in mourning 
because she had lost a brother. While she stayed I spent 
at least one afternoon of every week with her at the Russells' 
house in Harley Street, sometimes lunching, sometimes 
coming in after lunch and spending the greater part of the 
afternoon with Miss Mulholland in her own room. 

She had somewhat nun-like ideas of what a girl might 
or might not do in London, and she would not hear of my 
travelling back to North London, where I was staying, at 
a late hour and unaccompanied. So I always left before 
the afternoon was too far advanced, and she used to come 
with me for a portion of the way, and put me into my final 
'bus. She had no idea of how independent and daring I 
really was. 

I recall this fact because of my first meeting with the 
future Lord Chief Justice of England. I was coming down- 
stairs one afternoon, cloaked and hatted, when the great 
man appeared. He was dining out. He very often was 
dining out in those days, and he used to get home to dress 
and to see his family. He was a devoted husband and 
father, a pattern of the domesticities. While he dressed 
the whole family clustered round him in his dressing-room. 
One could, feel in the house the atmosphere of love and 
admiration that surrounded him. 

He came bustling out and we met in the hall and were 

[ 179] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

introduced. "But you're going to stay for dinner?" he said. 
"Surely you're going to stay for dinner !" He said it with 
the air of a command. I should have liked to stay, but my 
friend's carefulness for me intervened. I don't think she 
said I would not stay. I imagine that in his own house his 
will was law. We waited till he had disappeared before 
going off. 

He was the kindest and warmest of hosts, and had the 
old-fashioned way of heaping hospitality on his guests. In- 
deed a truly Irish hospitality was the rule of the house. It 
was his custom when he had a dinner-party to brew a 
wonderful punch after the ladies had departed. A man 
with whom punch did not agree told me that he dreaded 
that moment when Sir Charles ladled him out his tumbler 
of punch and sent it down to him. He might have dis- 
pensed a total abstainer; but my friend was not one and 
was expected to drink the host's punch. Once he was at 
Sir Charles's elbow so that the eagle eye was only obliquely 
upon him. His punch was forgotten. The bowl was empty 
and he began to rejoice, not daring to rejoice too much. 
He was not out of the wood. Suddenly Sir Charles dis- 
covered the omission. "Take mine,'' he said, planting his 
own untouched tumbler before the guest, who had to drink 
every drop of it. 

From Mr. Barry O'Brien's Life of Lord Russell of 
Killowen I carry away one charming impression. It is his 
daughter who speaks : "My first memory of my father is 
of a curly head on the nursery floor." He was the most 
fortunate of great men. Fearless, strenuous, dominating, 
he might make enemies without while all honest men praised 
him : his home was his strong and sure fortress within which 
there was nothing but peace and love. 

I have an impression during those November days that 

[i8o] 



THE ROSSETTIS AND OTHERS 

the Crawford Divorce Case^ in which Sir Charles Russell 
was engaged, was proceeding. I remember the news com- 
ing in of the day's result, hearing it whispered by someone 
or other. It reminds me of what I have stated in an earlier 
part of this book about Sir Charles Dilke's belittling of Mr, 
Parnell. Since that was written I have told it to someone in 
Irish public life, who said : "That is perfectly explicable. 
Early in the eighties there was a cabal to get rid of Gladstone 
and put Chamberlain in his place. Dilke was working the 
Irishmen, but Parnell got wind of it and squelched the 
whole thing.'' I do not vouch for the truth of the story, 
but give it as it was given to me. 

Another memory connecting Mr. Parnell and Sir Charles 
Dilke is of Mr, Parnell's walking into a Dublin newspaper 
office some time before his death, and saying quietly : "I 
see that Sir Charles Dilke has been selected as Liberal 
candidate for the Forest of Dean," and walking out again. 

Other visits I made that autumn were to the Rossettis. 
I paid an afternoon visit to Mr. William Rossetti, whose 
wife was wintering abroad for her health. He showed me 
a good many relics of Dante Gabriel, many sketches and 
pictures; and I was allowed to handle the volumes of the 
Germ, all a matter of untold delight to me. I saw Christina 
a few days later for the first time. I also had the good 
fortune to meet the mother of the Rossettis, who died in 
the following April. 

William Rossetti, who had and has a painstaking way of 
explaining everything, had told me that Christina lived with 
her mother and her aunts — two old Misses Polidorl — and 
looked after them. "We are a household of old ladies," 
said Christina, in the drawing-room at Torrington Square. 
The Rossettis were true Bloomsbury people. One would 
have expected to find Christina and her charges somewhere 

[i8i] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

among gardens, within easy reach of the country, if 
not in the country itself. 

She explained to me that she stayed in Bloomsbury to 
be near her brother William, first of all, and other friends. 
"We are a very attached family," she said. "Alas! there 
used to be Gabriel." I think, too, she stayed because of her 
favourite church in Munster Square, but I do not remember 
that she said anything about that. 

I had been prepared to meet her as a saint. I remember 
that the Meynells envied me going to visit her, saying: 
"You will have the privilege of seeing a saint." I was 
somewhat taken aback when she entered the room, wearing 
short serviceable skirts of an iron grey tweed and stout 
boots. It did not at all consort with her face or with her 
poetry. One knew of her even then as somewhat of an 
invalid. I should have expected to find her in trailing robes 
of soft, beautifully coloured material like all the writing 
and painting world of that day. Her dress did not at all 
go with her spiritual face and the heavily lidded, wide- 
apart eyes which one only finds in a highly gifted woman. 
The heavy lids were less of a beauty than they had been 
when her brother delighted to paint them. 

I certainly believe that she made the worst of herself, 
perhaps as a species of mortification. She even affected a 
short, matter-of-fact way of speaking which took me some- 
what aback at our first meeting. She put one off sitting 
at her feet completely. "I wrote such melancholy things 
when I was young," she said, "that I am obliged to be un- 
usually cheerful, not to say robust, in my old age." 

At a later date I told her how taken aback I had been 
by the dress and the boots, and I remember how she laughed. 
As that impression disappeared completely on further ac- 

ri82] 



THE ROSSETTIS AND OTHERS 

quaintance, I have sometimes imagined that she set herself 
dehberately to undo my expectations of her. 

I must have paid quite a long visit. A little time after 
my arrival she went out of the room and came back leading 
her mother, whom she established in an easy chair by the 
fire. The dusk of the winter day was closing in. I can see 
the noble old face glimmering in the shadows of the room. 

Christina encouraged me to talk. I know I said a great 
many things about my feeling for Dante Gabriel to which 
the old mother listened with a hand over her ear, the better 
to hear, and a well-pleased smile. When she failed to catch 
what I said, Christina repeated it to her, bending down to 
her ear. She had to hear everything. The two heads side 
by side were exactly as D. G. Rossetti had painted them. 
I remember how Mrs. Rossetti patted her daughter's hand 
for something I had said, murmuring "My affectionate 
Christina." 

After tea the old lady went away, but Christina would 
not hear of my going. She lit three or four candles. Out- 
side it was wet, the rain glittering on the wet gas-lit pave- 
ments, and the leaves of the shabby evergreens in Torring- 
ton Square. The fire was low, scarcely more than a hand- 
ful. My memory of the room is that it was gloomy. One 
felt the shadow of old age and death within the house, 
the home which Christina Rossetti had chosen for herself 
where she must often have desired the beauty of fields and 
hills and the sea. Not the merest excuse for a garden. In 
front of the house the dreary London garden — an oblong, 
not a square, full of stunted and shabby trees. All very 
well for a Winter afternoon visit as though to a shrine, but 
to live there! And the town had nothing to give her; she 
was not of those for whom the great city has its delights 
and fascinations. I believe she received all who desired to 

[183] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

see her. She told me that many Americans came. But she 
never went out except to her own people. Beyond her vis- 
itors — and I think she must have suffered them gladly — she 
had no social life. I have had letters from her from 
•Brighton and Torquay. She always said that she had been 
sent to those places for health's sake. She never expressed' 
any pleasure in being there rather than in Torrington 
Square. 

As we sat by the low fire in the somewhat dreary room 
that wet winter afternoon with the dusk closing in, we 
talked among other things of Coventry Patmore. She told 
me, extenuating the second and third marriages, of how 
a visitor going in to see him after the death of "the Angel" 
found him sitting in the dark, by a dying fire, weeping alone. 
He was not fit to live without a woman's love and care. 

She showed me various relics, some Rossetti pictures: 
a sketch of "poor Lizzie," Gabriel's wife, asleep in her arm- 
chair wonderfully graceful. "Poor little Lizzie!" she said, 
and in reply to my asking if she was so beautiful : "She 
and Mrs. Morris were the brides of one year and no one 
could say which was the most beautiful." — "Poor little 
Lizzie!" she said again. "Poor little wife and mother! 
Poor little baby!" 

She let me talk about her poems, now and again telling 
me something that bore on them. There was one poem, 
"Maggie: A Lady," I think, of which she said: "Gabriel 
said when I read it to him : 'You've been thinking of Lady 
Geraldine's Courtship,' and," she added, "I had." 

She also talked about her little god-child. Dr. Gordon 
Hake's grand-daughter, Ursula, to whom she had given 
her own string of corals. I had had the pleasure of nursing 
that young lady, who displayed a most friendly spirit on 
our first acquaintanceship, and I had handled the corals, 

[184] 





Gabriei Dante Rossetti 



Christina Rossetti 





William Rossetti 



Mrs William Rossetti 



THE ROSSETTIS AND OTHERS 

with much envy of so precious a possession, which had been 
worn by Gabriel in babyhood as well as by Christina. 

William Rossetti had told me at that or some other time 
of Christina's love affairs. The last and deepest was that 
with C. B. Cayley, who translated Petrarch and the Iliad of 
Homer. She had refused James Collinson because he was a 
Catholic. She refused C. B. Cayley because he was an 
agnostic. Reading her love-poems, one sees that she was 
really not at all nun-like. Romantic love must have stayed 
with her to the end. Later on, when I was collecting 
autograph-books for a Boston bazaar, she sent me with 
some books from herself several volumes by C. B. Cayley. 
Whether she was stripping herself of precious possessions, 
or whether she had bought up a number of his books, I do 
not know. 

On some visit or other, for I paid her many, she told me 
that she always picked up a piece of printed paper when she 
found it, lest it should bear the Holy Name and be trodden 
upon. 

Christina's life has never been written — there was a very 
inadequate attempt at a biography by Mr. Mackenzie Bell, 
published in the years succeeding her death. But he seems 
to have had few documents of intimate memories to draw 
upon. Perhaps one of these days — unless Christina wished 
her life not to be written, which is possible — one of her 
nieces may repair the omission. Mr. William Rossetti, so 
careful, so painstaking, so devoted, must have a deal of inti- 
mate matter to draw from respecting his illustrious sister 
and brother beyond the Introduction to Christina in the 
Oxford Poets and memorial articles. 



[ i8S ] 



CHAPTER XVI 

MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

After my winter in London that year I went down to 
Norfolk to pay a farewell visit to the Pagans before re- 
turning home. During the wmter I had seen something of 
Mrs. Pagan in town, where she stayed with her old friend 
Mrs. Rickett, at whose house I met Mr., now Sir Joseph 
Compton Rickett, who had written a volume of good 
religious poetry, St. Christopher and Other Poems, and was 
to write a memorable volume of prose, The Christ That is 
to Be. Both these books were so good that it makes me 
regret that Sir Compton should have become absorbed in 
politics and other things to the exclusion of literature. He 
was a serious, gentle, and handsome man, who looked his 
poetry. 

That winter I stayed some time with Miss Evelyn Noble, 
who, under the name of Evelyn Pyne, had published two 
or three volumes of poems, which were much praised at 
the time. I remember the beginning of a sonnet of hers 
on Richborough Castle, which seems to me to have some- 
thing of the authentic touch : 

"It stands amid its cornfields haughtily, 
Those wonderful wind-wave cornfields, cool and green, 
Whose phantom waters sunlit and opaline 
Comfort the castle which hath lost the sea." 

She was one of those who are passionately devoted to poetry 
in their youth, but let it go with their youth. She did not 
follow up her first successes and I lost sight of her, though 
I remember coming upon some of her articles in the re- 
views in later years, and she corresponded with my dear 

[i86] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

Father Russell, to whom I had introduced her, long after 
her correspondence with me had dropped. 

I do not remember anything special about my second 
visit to the Pagans, but, leaving them on my journey home- 
ward, which took me by way of King's Lynn and Peterbor- 
ough to Rugby, I had a very interesting adventure. 

I remember it as a bleak, snowy day. I had joined the 
train at Thetford, and in the carriage with me was an elderly 
parson. I wanted a footwarmer and was unable to pro- 
cure one, so I settled down as comfortably as might be in 
my corner, extracting from my bag a note-book and pro- 
ceeding to write a poem or get one into shape as a solace 
for my journey. He had heard me ask for a footwarmer, 
and a little while after the train started he asked me if I 
would share his. This necessitated a move to his end of the 
carriage. I had had the good fortune to strike a distin- 
guished literary man, the Rev, Whitwell Elwin, Rector of 
Booton, Norfolk, editor of the great edition of Pope, and 
a former editor of the Quarterly Review. 

I believe the conversation began by his offering me papers 
to read. The cause celebre of the moment was Mrs. 
Weldon's action against Dr. Forbes Winslow, for giving 
a false certificate of lunacy. We talked first of that sub- 
ject. Nothing could have been milder and gentler of aspect 
than my old parson. I could not have imagined him as 
an ex-editor of the Quarterly Review and the one who had 
picked the great little man of Twickenham to pieces, fixing 
him for all time. 

After a while he asked me what I had been writing. I 
suppose he had noticed and been amused by my pondering 
air, my poised pencil. I told him that it was verse and 
he was greatly interested. He asked me if I knew any- 

[■87] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

thing of the poetry of Owen Meredith. Did I indeed ? Had 
I not grown up with it? 

In my small library, while I was yet a growing child, 
there were a couple of early volumes of the Cornhill in its 
great days — the days of Thackeray's editorship. I read 
and re-read those volumes avidly and had the poetry ofif by 
heart. What a magazine! There were Thackeray's Four 
Georges and The Story of Philip. There was Trollope's 
Framley Parsonage. There was George MacDonald's The 
Portent. For poetry there was Mrs. Browning's Great 
God Pan and Little Mattie. Ruskin was of the contributors 
with Unto This Last. Millais was among the artists. 
Those volumes must have been a delight to many an im- 
aginative child in those days; for I have discovered several 
of my own day writers who were brought up on them as 
I was. 

As soon as I was asked if I knew Owen Meredith, I reeled 
ofif from my precious Cornhill: 

"Will, are you sitting and watching there yet? for I knew by a 

certain skill 
That grows out of utter wakefulness the night must be far 

spent, Will. 
For, lying awake for many a night, I have learnt at last 

to catch 
From the crowing cock and the clanging clocks and the tick 

of the beating watch, 
A misty sense of the measureless march of Time as he 

passes here, 
Leaving my life behind him, and I know that the dawn 

is near." 

Did I know Owen Meredith? He must have been a poet 
of the young, of the romantic boys at the Universities, who 
adored Maud and knew Arthur O'Shaughnessy and Philip 
Bourke Marston, and such like minor bards by heart, to say 
nothing of Morris, Swinburne, and Rossetti. And talk- 

[ jSS ] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

ing of Marston reminds me how he used to be led into 
Lady Wilde's receptions, and how one sat beside him and 
took his hand and talked to the sightless eyes. 

Lord Lytton would have liked to be the poet of the 
young : so he was fortunate in that as in all else. His poetry 
was a wonder-world to me, just as Maud was. My clever 
family of girls of the Land League days and I used to go 
about ranting bits from Maud: "Birds in the high Hall- 
garden," and "I have led her home, my love, my only 
dear," and "Ah, that 'twere possible" — finding in them the 
expression of our own romantic hearts. So, too, we had a 
passionate pleasure in Owen Meredith. They had Lucille 
and other Poems, and we used to pore over : 

"My little love, do you remember, 

Ere we were grown so sadly wise, 
Those evenings in the bleak December, 
Curtained warm from the snowy weather, 
When you and I played chess together 

Checkmated by each other's eyes?" 

And that very Morrisian poem which I am quite sure in- 
fluenced me in my early verse : 

"Sometimes 'neath dripping white rose-leaves 
I ride, and under gilded eaves 
Of scarlet bowers, where plucking flowers 
With scarlet skirts and stiff gold sleeves 
Betwixt green walls, and two by two 
Kings' daughters walk while just a few 
'Faint harps make music mild that falls 
Like mist from off the ivied walls 
Along the sultry corn, and stirs 
The hearts of far-off harvesters." 

Again I reeled off the poem in which Owen Meredith was 
most himself, the poem in which I still find the magic, the 
air of glamour which attached to it when I was young. It 
is called Aux Italiens. The lover at the Opera amid the 

[189] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

glories of the Second Empire, when Napoleon III and 
Eugenie are present in state, with the proud beauty by his 
side whom he is to marry, remembers his little lost love : 

"Meanwhile I was thinking of my first love 

As I had not been thinking of her for years, 
Till over my eyes there began to move 
Something that hurt like tears. 

I thought of the dress she wore last time 
We stood 'neath the cypress trees together, 

In that lost land, in that soft clime, 
In the crimson evening weather. 

Of her muslin dress, for the eve was hot, 
Of her warm young neck in its golden chain, 

And her full soft hair just tied in a knot 
And falling loose again. 

And the jasmine flower in her fair young breast, 
Oh, the faint sweet smell of the jasmine flower! 

And the one bird winging alone to his nest 
And the one star over the tower. 

I thought of our little quarrels and strife 

And the letter that brought me back my ring, 

And it all seemed then in the waste of life 
Such a very little thing. 

I thought of her grave below the hill 
Which the sentinel cypress tree stands over, 

And I thought if but she were living still 
How I could forgive and love her. 

And I swear as I thought of her in that hour, 

And how so often old things are best, 
I smelt the smell of the jasmine flower 

She used to wear in her breast. 

And I turned and looked. She was sitting there 

In a dim box over the stage and drest 
In the muslin dress that she used to wear 

And the jasmine flower in her breast. 

[ 190] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

She is not dead and she is not wed, 
But she loves me now and she loved me then, 

And the very first words her sweet lips said 
My heart grew young again. 

The Marchioness there of Carabas, 

Is wealthy and young and handsome still, 
And but for her — well, we'll let that pass. 

She can marry who ever she will. 

But I will marry my own old love 

With the primrose face, for old things are best; 

And the flower in her bosom I prize it above 
The gems on my lady's breast. 

I think in the lives of most women and men 
There's a moment when all would go smooth and even 

If only the dead could find out when 
To come back and be forgiven. 

But O the smell of the jasmine flower, 

And O the music and O the way 
That voice rang out from the donjon tower 

Non ti scordar di me! Non ti scordar di me!" 

Writing it out now, it seems very faulty, weak, violent, 
slipshod. And yet — what enchantment of lost youth, what 
glamour of first love is in it, making it fragrant with a sharp, 
bitter-sweet fragrance that brings the tears to the eyes! 
I cannot read it coldly : I care nothing for its imperfections. 
I put down my face upon it as I might on a withered bundle 
of verbena and lavender, wild thyme and southern-wood, 
and I am away, with a breaking heart, to the Land of 
Youth, the lost land. 

Lord Lytton belonged very much to his period. In his 
poetry we find the exact note of girlish passion to which we 
sang our songs — Ruby, by Virginia Gabriel — dearest of 
all — When Sparrows Build, the songs of Claribel. The 
little first love of the poem was mid- Victorian, the muslin 
frock, the losely falling hair, the golden chain about her 

[191] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

neck. She was before the days of strenuous womanhood. 
The Higher Education, the bicycle, hockey, and golf were 
not for her; she would have been bewildered if you offered 
her the Vote: she left all the business of the great world 
to her men-folk : she married at sixteen and produced many 
sons and daughters, and displayed an efficiency in rearing 
them and managing her house little short of miraculous con- 
sidering her opportunities. Many ladies of to-day would 
consider her a little fool. But oh, how sweet she was, and 
how dearly loved! Man may find his equal mate in these 
days and be very happy with her; but at heart man is a 
mid-Victorian still. He sighs for the little girl with the 
primrose face and the muslin frock, the Dora of David 
Copperfield. 

I said all I had to say or could remember of Owen 
Meredith, and my old parson listened with a peculiar at- 
tention which seemed no wise strange to me: I had found 
my world very kind. When I had finished he told me that 
he was on his way to stay with Lord Lytton at Knebworth, 
and assured me that Lord Lytton would be greatly inter- 
ested to hear of our meeting, which doubtless was true, for 
it was a very odd coincidence that his visitor should have 
struck such a devotee. Not for the first time my excellent 
memory had served me well; there was a day when I had 
repeated to Ursula Hake's mother a poem of hers which 
had appeared in the Graphic some years earlier. I had not 
the remotest idea about the authorship when I read it, and 
I do not think Mrs. Hake had followed up that first poem; 
but for some reason or other it had stuck fast in my mind 
and I was able to repeat it. 

Having told me of the coincidence, Mr. Elwin went on 
to talk of other things. I suppose It was in some spirit of 
daring — some feeling that I must not be a coward and keep 

[ 192] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

back the truth, that I told him of my connection with the 
Land League. To my amazement, so far from being 
shocked — I had been afraid he would withdraw himself 
from our delightful friendly intercourse — he congratulated 
me on my opportunities, and suggested that I should write 
a novel of the League. 

We parted the most excellent friends at Cambridge. He 
said that he would get a copy of Louise de la Valliere and 
show it to Lord Lytton. I offered to send him one, but 
he would not hear of it, saying that young writers should 
not give away their books. In lieu of a visiting card he 
wrote on the flyleaf of my nott-book: Rev. W. Elwin, 
Boot on Rectory, Norwich. Even then I was not enlightened 
— I was a very ignorant little provincial person — till my 
better-informed friends told me that I had fallen in with 
an angel unaware in the shape of an ex-editor of the Quar- 
terly and the editor of Pope. 

Under date March i6, 1886, Mr. Elwin wrote to me 
what I think must have been a second letter. I cannot find 
the first, nor do I remember how many letters I had from 
him in all. I have a way of depositing precious letters in 
books, which gives me the delight of many unexpected finds ; 
but I am very well aware that there are many I shall never 
find. However, it keeps them clean: there is so much to 
be said for the practice. I will put down here as much of 
the correspondence as I have been able to discover. I never 
accepted Lord Lytton's kind invitation to Knebworth, partly 
out of shyness, partly because I had heard that Knebworth 
was haunted by the ghost of Lord Castlereagh. I was at 
that time, and always, very nervous. I was not exactly 
superstitious, but I thought it well to be on the safe side. 
As for my shyness — well, one would imagine, with the 
extraordinary good fortune that had befallen me in the 

[ 193 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

making of friends, and the most extraordinary daring I 
showed in making them, that I need not and could not 
have been shy. But;, as a matter of fact, I had a painful 
shyness and distrust of myself; and in those days a delayed 
letter or a lapse of correspondence caused me untold 
anguish lest I should have disgusted my friends with me. 
Perhaps it was a useful provision against my being a bore, 
which I might have been otherwise, since I was very 
enthusiastic. 

For the rest of that memorable journey on which I met 
Mr. Elwin — how cold it was and snowy! — I fared excel- 
lently well. I was taken in charge from Cambridge to 
Rugby by a kind young man in gaiters, who might have 
been a superior sort of big farmer. He treated me with the 
most brotherly kindness, seeing that I was fed and warmed 
on my cold journey. I think of him as a true gentleman, 
and send him my salutations wherever he may be. 

At Rugby I waited four whole hours for the Irish mail. 
The station was rebuilding, and the place more desolate than 
it need have been, I wandered about for those four hours, 
and even yet the sound of a railway whistle at night re- 
minds me of that lonely vigil. I can see the rails running 
away in all directions, and the foggy and frosty sky with 
the red of the frost or some distant furnace in it. The 
lonely engines out in the night seemed to call to each other. 
I suppose it must have been late when I got the Irish mail — 
or the express, perhaps — for I remember the big station 
as a deserted place. There was not even a fire in the 
waiting-room, which was warmed by hot-air pipes, and .was 
most desolate. 

In the train again I met friends — a couple of fatherly, 
elderly men, who made me lie down and gave me a couple 
of rugs, and talked in murmurs of cattle and crops under 

[ 194] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

the light of a shaded lamp till the tiresome journey was 
over at Holyhead. 

And now here are the letters in their order as far as I 
can trace them. When the last letter from Lord Lytton 
came he was on the eve of taking up his duties as Am- 
bassador at Paris. He would seem to have been a most 
charming, debonair and kind person. I have always been 
grateful for the chance which made me the recipient of his 
kindness. 

BooTON Rectory, Norwich, 
March i6, 1886. 

My dear Miss Tynan, — The burnt letter was not from 
me, but I am glad the thought came into your head that it 
might be, since to this I owe the pleasure of yours, though 
I had no need of it to recall the delightful little journey we 
had from Thetford to Cambridge. The second edition of 
your poems was not then out, and not knowing when they 
would be ready, there was nothing to lead me to order them 
at one time rather than another. I have done it now, and 
shall have them in a day or two. Southey used to say that 
if his friends and acquaintances had only sufficient thought 
for his interests to buy each a volume of his poetry when 
he published one, he should be easy in his circumstances. It 
is commonly all that an individual can do for an author. 
Holding this to be the right principle, I told you I would 
prefer to buy your volume, or I should have been delighted 
that you should give it me. To buy a single copy is a trifle : 
to give many copies is not. And nothing can be better worth 
the money it costs than a book which contributes to the 
permanent stores of your mind. 

I related to Lord Lytton the particulars of our meeting 
and conversation, and the pleasure and benefit you had de- 

[ 195 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

rived from his early poems. He could not but be interested. 
He and his eldest daughter are coming here on Wednesday 
to stay a few days, and he will no doubt be with us when 
your book arrives, so that you may be sure of its being 
brought under his notice. His love of poetry increases 
instead of diminishing with years, and he is more a poet 
after his long career of diplomacy and government than he 
ever was in the first flush of fervid youth. You will hear 
from me again when I have your poems to write about. 

This is a retired little village, and my tastes are those of 
a recluse. I have more pleasure in the pleasant tranquillity 
of a happy domestic life, in the simple beauties of nature, 
and in my functions among our country rustics, than in all 
the united grandeurs of the bustling world. And in this 
happiness literature has a big share, for it is to appropriate 
to oneself the best, the wisest, the most beautiful thoughts 
of the greatest minds that have ever existed in the tide of 
time. You, too, have this boon, and I hope you are enjoy- 
ing it to the full. — Good-bye for to-day, and believe me 
always most sincerely yours. 

W. Elwin. 

BooTON Rectory, Norwich, 

March 22, 1886. 

Dear Miss Tynan, — Mr. Elwin, who has shown me a 
little volume of your poems, which 1 have read with in- 
terest, assures me that you would like to receive from me 
some statement of my impressions of them ; and, as I believe 
implicitly in everything that Mr. Elwin tells me, my faith 
in this assurance is so strong that I am constrained to act 
upon it, in spite of the difficulty of doing so — a difficulty 
which you, a poetess, will understand, for it lies in the dif- 
ference between writing poetry and writing about poetry. 

[ 196 ] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

The impressions conveyed by poetry are necessarily indefi- 
nite, and the attempt to give them definite expression is 
an all but impossible one — at least to me. Interjections 
are the only form in which my own impressions of poetry 
find natural utterance, but what I think of your poems will 
not be made intelligible to you by "Oh's" and "Ah's." 
I must try to explain it otherwise, and if I "mingle blame 
with praise" it is because mere compliments to the authoress 
of the little book I have just been reading would not, in 
my sincere opinion, be adequate tribute to the merit I find 
in it. I am not at all familiar with the course of contem- 
porary poetry, but let me say at once that I think there is 
a more genuine faculty of song, more spontaneity and sin- 
cerity of expression, in this little book than in any of the 
new poems that I happen to have read for many years 
back. Your mastery of the craft and mechanism of verse 
also appears to me superior to that of most of the minor 
modern poets, for it is effective without being affected ; and 
indeed the excellence of your versification is so great that, 
had these poems been written eighty years ago. they would 
have made an epoch in the history of English poetry. But 
it is this reflection which marks in my own mind the limit 
of their relative value. From what I have already said of 
them, I hope you will understand and believe that I am 
very far from thinking them mere echoes. That they are 
not. They have an honest individuality of their own; but 
it is an individuality influenced by the spirit and style of 
recent or contemporary writers to an extent which subdues 
and shapes its most salient features into conformity with 
the prevalent pattern of a whole group of which each indi- 
vidual member reproduces with but slight variation the 
dominant collective type of the age that has produced it. 
To all members of such a group the source of impressions — 

[197] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

sentiments and emotions, and the vocabulary of language — 
seem to be more or less common, and the one differs from 
the other mainly in the vividness with v^hich he sees and 
feels the same things, or the felicity with which he employs 
the same vocabulary. For instance, to apply these observa- 
tions to yourself. Your poem of the Dreamers is a very 
striking and beautiful poem; I like it better, and read it 
with more pleasure than I do most of Rossetti's poems, and 
by only the very best of his does it seem to me excelled in 
workmanship. But then the most distinctive features are 
those in which I most recognise a family likeness to a pa- 
rental group or school of modern poets. So again, all your 
poems abound in beautiful expressions — suggestive images 
and musical cadences which are certainly not imitated from 
any particular contemporary poet, but which are. I think, 
conceived in the spirit and employed in the manner more 
or less common to them all, and the merit which remains 
your own in that you employ them more happily than many 
of your contemporaries. This condition of compulsory con- 
formity to a prevalent pattern is not peculiar, however, to 
the poetry of our age. In all the Elizabethan poets and 
in all those of the eighteenth century, we find the same 
family likeness and the same fidelity to a common type. 
The first could not be all Shakespeares, nor the second all 
be Popes; but the minor poets of both eras have bequeathed 
to us many beautiful productions that we should be sorry 
to lose, and each in his own day helped to beautify or refine 
the age that inspired him. 

What I have presumed to say of your relation as a poet 
to the other poets of your time is not said in any spirit 
of discouragement. But, at any rate, it expresses exactly 
what I feel about all my own earlier productions in verse, 

[198] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

whenever I look back to them. It gives me sincere pleasure 
to know by your letter to Mr. Elwin that some of them have 
given pleasure to you — but the greater number of them, 
which, when I wrote them, I believed to be entirely indi- 
vidual, now appear to me more or less generic — and I un- 
derstand better than I did when I was young the truth of 
that saying of Schiller's that the poet (if favoured by 
Providence) should be stolen away in Infancy — concealed 
by the Muses from the age to which he was born, and re- 
turn to it only when full grown, as a stranger — if not as 
a destroyer. 

1 had more to say about your poems — amongst other 
things, that I think I see a strengthened growth of your 
own individuality in the poem of the "Nested Bird" — but 
I must end this letter; and after having read the volume 
of your poems which Mr. Elwin has shown me — as well 
as your letter to him, and having heard from him so much 
about you — it is not as "a. stranger" that I ask you to accept 
congratulations on the past and good wishes for the future, 
from your present reader and correspondent. 

Lytton. 

Kneb WORTH, March 28, 1886. 

Dear Miss Tynan, — La Valliere has safely arrived at 
this hermitage, which I take to be as quiet as her French 
convent, and where I hope you will join her any time that 
you happen to be again in this part of the not yet disunited 
kingdom. I am just starting for Italy, but expect to be back 
by the end of May. 

A thousand thanks for the book, and for the — too modest 
— description of it. — Yours very sincerely. 

Lytton. 

[ 199] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

BooTON Rectory, Norwich, 
March 30, 1886. 

My dear Miss Tynan, — You need be under no appre- 
hension that you did not express yourself adequately to 
Lord Lytton. He wrote me word that he had received "a 
very pretty letter" from you, which he was going to answer, 
and he has since sent me "the very pretty letter" itself. I 
thought it charming, both in its feeling and language. 
Nothing could be happier or more appropriate. 

I related to him the circumstance of our meeting the 
day it took place, and when he was here the other day, I 
put your volume into his hands. The rest you owe to your- 
self and your poems and him. No man has a warmer and 
more generous nature than he, no one a keener apprecia- 
tion of what is beautiful, whether in verse or prose. I was 
delighted he wrote his views to you himself instead of leav- 
ing it to me to report them, because beside the pleasure 
to yourself, which I was sure would be great, the experi- 
ence of a poet far advanced in his career must have some 
utility for those who are comparatively young. My sum- 
mary of his oral remarks would have been a poor substitute 
for his very words written with his own hand. I do not 
doubt you know from himself by this time that he is pleased 
you sent him your book. The gift is to be valued. Only, 
when there is a choice, we must sometimes remember that 
we ought to pay tribute to authors for the benefit we derive 
from them instead of their paying tax to us. 

Wherever the early pieces of great poets have been pre- 
served, they are invariably imitations of previous poets. Art 
of every description — music and painting as well as litera- 
ture — is acquired by studying models, and minds are so 
constructed that they are compelled to follow, in many 
respects, the manner of the teacher before they can strike 

[ 200 ] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

out an independent manner of their own. If this has hap- 
pened to you, you have only submitted to an invincible 
law of nature. Lord Lytton is much better read than I 
am in the newest race of poets. I stop for the most part 
with the men who were famous in my youth and early or 
middle manhood, and some of the imitations apparent to 
him are hidden from me. But I have read enough of the 
latest poetry to observe that there is a strong inclination 
towards mysticism — to a want of definiteness in the ideas 
and of lucidity in the expression. In the midst of your 
touching thoughts and sweet, melodious language, I think 
I sometimes remark this tendency in you. I speak doubt- 
fully, because the fault may be in my own dull perceptions 
and not in your imperfect delineations. But if I were a 
poet myself I should not fulfil my ideal unless my con- 
ceptions were vivid, and my words their reflex. I was 
delighted to read in your letter to Lord Lytton that you 
were turning your attention to the Gaelic legends of Ire- 
land. Here with the poetic skill you have acquired, the mas- 
tery over metre and language, you can adopt a treatment 
of your own, making the deeds and passions, the love and 
hate, the sorrow and the joy, the daring and the misdoing 
live again by the picturesque power of an imagination which 
has beheld the scenes and looked into the hearts of the 
actors, and realised for itself their varied emotions in all 
their strength. Your present volume is the prelude which 
has prepared you for this grander performance, and I hope 
you will spare no pains to make it worthy of your subject 
and yourself. 

I value exceedingly the kind words you write to me. 
Kindness is always delightful, however small may be our 
title to it. A meeting which seemed accidental at the time 
I now conclude had a purpose from the fruit it has borne; 

[201 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

and we will hope there is more to come, both personal and 
poetical. — Good-bye for to-day, and believe me always most 
sincerely yours. W. Elwin. 

i6 Portland Place, London, 
June 9, 1886. 

My dear Miss Tynan, — I got your delightful little letter 
just as I was leaving home yesterday morning. I have for 
weeks had the almost daily intention of answering its 
equally delightful predecessor. Nothing could be further 
from my thoughts than to drop the correspondence. But 
though I have not been seriously ill, the keen air of the 
winter and spring produced in our neighbourhood a sort 
of epidemic of constitutional cold, which struck into the 
system and laid people by for weeks. I had my turn, and 
being wanted by my sick parishioners I had several re- 
lapses from being enticed out too soon. This, with a variety 
of local occupations, which sometimes come in clusters, 
made me put off till to-morrow whatever I was not com- 
pelled to do to-day. And when once you begin to procrasti- 
nate, it is apt to gain force the longer it continues. I am 
glad your kind letter has come to put a period to further 
delay. 

Lord Lytton has been to Italy and took Lady Betty 
with him for a companion. They had a delightful time, 
half at Florence, and half at Venice. They are now in this 
house for their London season, and with much difficulty 
I have managed to leave my local entanglements for a day 
or two to come and see them. They will be here till the 
end of July. In my hurried visit the very minutes are occu- 
pied and you must wait till I am home again for a real 
letter. Only, I must just say that your fears that you may 
disappoint the Lyttons when you go to Knebworth are 

[ 202 ] 



MR. ELWIN AND LORD LYTTON 

entirely groundless. Your letters are the counterpart of 
yourself, and as they think your letters charming, they 
will have the same opinion of you. I will tell you more 
of them when next I write. — Good-bye for to-day, my dear 
Miss Tynan, and believe me always, most sincerely yours, 

W. Elwin. 

My projected visit to Knebworth never took place. Be- 
fore I visited England again Lord Lytton had gone to India 
as Viceroy. The correspondence continued over a year and 
lapsed after that. I never saw Mr. Elwin again. I was to 
have visited him when I came back to Norfolk. But I was 
not there again till 1889, when he was in failing health and 
the end in sight. 

Knebworth, July 9, 1887. 

My dear Miss Tynan, — You have divined the truth. 
I could not sooner thank you for the gift of your book, 
because I did not know your address. 

I think that in the Irish Legends you have made a de- 
cided advance ; and I had meant to send you my impressions 
of them more in detail. But unfortunately I have left the 
book behind me in town, and am now writing in such un- 
avoidable haste amid so many interruptions, that I cannot 
attempt to do so at present. 

Our dear and good friend, Mr. Elwin, is at Booton and 
well. He was staying with us in town a few weeks ago. — 
With all good wishes, yours very sincerely, 

Lytton. 



[203] 



CHAPTER XVII 

1886 

The spring of 1886 was made happy to me by something 
which was a recognition of my advancement, and that 
was that instead of receiving my friends in the ordinary 
reception rooms of the house I must have a pretty room 
of my own in which to receive them and to do my work. 
I had for some time enjoyed the privilege of possessing a 
room of my own into which I had gathered an old Georgian 
book-case, a table to work at, a chair or two, and my 
precious Rossetti pictures. The room was a dark one be- 
cause of its little window high up in the thatch — the very 
window the bull used to roar by in those golden-misty days 
long ago; only that in the transmogrification of things 
when the little house was pulled about, the window from 
being the centre of a mere slit of a room had become the 
centre of a little square one, quite large enough for a young 
writer's sitting-room. 

Sometime in that happy spring my father decided that 
the room was not good enough for me. I tell all this in 
detail, because it is a setting forth of his love for me, that 
warm love and approval which made those days so rosy. 

In the first place, for the little narrow window high 
up, with its deep window ledge, which must have been just 
the same when Curran lived in the house — why, Sarah 
Curran may have used that room and Emmet come and 
gone there! — he replaced by a bow window, quite out of 
keeping with the house, yet beautiful for admitting air and 
light. My window looked south on the old orchard of long 
ago. I had still an old apple-tree in my view with a mossy 

[204] 



1886 

stone seat round the base, where immortal love-makings 
may have happened. For the rest there was green turf with 
flower beds cut in it, and beyond a tennis lawn, and be- 
yond that again orchard trees. The whole little cottage 
house was still wrapped up and embowered in monthly 
roses, honeysuckle, jessamine, and the Scotch rose. The 
Scotch rose had made its way in at the windows and had 
climbed the walls, unforbidden. There were also many 
fuchsias in great clumps, and in the orchard hedge syringa 
had run wild. We used to call it orange-blossom. 

When the building was done the room had to be decorated. 
In Ireland they never do things like anyone else ; there are 
always worlds enough and time to chew a sweet cud in. 
So we set about doing what was to be done with a most 
complete leisureliness. 

My father for a very strenuous man had the greatest 
capacity for leisureliness I ever knew. When one drove 
with him to town about his business there were immensely 
long pauses everywhere he went. He always took a chair 
if he only went into a shop to buy his tobacco; and it was 
a matter of resignation when you saw him from the pony- 
trap sitting down and preparing to fill his pipe. These 
conversations were to him what a club or a golf-links is to 
other and later men. His social instincts and sympathies 
were large, and it was indeed a sacrifice for him to have 
buried himself in the country far from the haunts of men. 

Of course, if you will think of it, the various bank man- 
agers, brewery clerks, tradesmen of all sorts whom he vis- 
ited must have had a great leisureliness too, for he was not 
one to stay where he was not appreciated. 

He and I went to a firm of painters and decorators in 
Bachelor's Walk to select our paper, paints, &c. There 
was a very small room to be done, and I am sure we spent 

[205] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

days over the papers, not selecting our own — that was an 
easy matter — but looking at the pattern-books and hearing 
from the principal himself all that he could tell us about 
the evolution of wall-papers. Meanwhile a patient pony, 
with a small boy at his head observing the passing show, 
waited for hours on our leisure. I can see my father occupy- 
ing a chair in the show-room endlessly filling and empty- 
ing his pipe, with a book of wall-papers open before him 
and the courteous Mr. McEntyre — I think that was his 
name — explaining and listening. 

My father was a born story-teller. Years after Mr. 
J. B. Yeats made a most speaking likeness of him — a sketch 
rather than a finished portrait, but to the life — during a 
two days' sitting, in which my father talked and smoked 
incessantly, and the painter and Mr. York Powell listened 
in delight. He would not be hastened or diverted. When 
Mr. Yeats would ask what became of someone whose story 
had not been finished, my father would say irascibly, "Damn 
it, man, let me tell my story my own way." 

From these leisurely discussions with Mr. McEntyre 
there resulted a pretty blue paper for my room, having a 
dado of lilies in vases on a darker blue, with a faint rich- 
ness of gold here and there. There also resulted paint 
in two shades of blue, also a pattern-book of dadoes where- 
with to line the cupboard in the wall, which was to have 
its solid door panel taken out and replaced by glass to 
show my china. Presently an old gentleman came along 
to do the job. Of course it expanded into all manner of 
jobs about the house. I believe that he took the summer 
to do the work in. It was an exquisite summer — or per- 
haps like the sun-dial I number only the golden hours — 
and the old man enjoyed a country summer, and even 
brought a grandchild to enjoy it with him. They slept in 

[206] 



1886 

a loft, and all day the old man went about his work 
leisurely, being always ready to stand for an hour at a time 
discussing the various National movements, and the things 
that were in the public mind at the moment. He had a 
taste for poetry, and it gave him pleasure to turn aside 
from his work to re-paint a bust of Shakespeare; and that 
led to his reminiscences of his old theatre-going days, over 
which my father and he would compare notes. Meanwhile, 
the small urban grandchild would be engaged in mild mis- 
chief or in making himself very ill eating unripe fruit. 
Once, on a very hot day, I came on what might have been 
a still-life group, so quiet were they, of a sick turkey and 
the small boy watering her from a watering-pot. He never 
turned a hair on being discovered in this nefarious act, but 
lifted up an eye as drowsy as the turkey's. "She had a 
great hate (i.e. heat) in her back," he said, "an' I was tryin' 
to take the drouth (i.e. thirst) off her." 

However, my room was turned out very prettily in due 
time. Perhaps there was a trifle too much gilding, but it 
was in narrow lines, and the room was very elegant. 
While the old painter was doing the odd jobs about the 
house, my father and I were engaged in making purchases 
in the same leisurely fashion. There was a blue carpet in 
an Aubusson design of faint roses : there were golden- 
coloured curtains. There was a little sofa, and there were 
various chairs which I had covered in Liberty cretonne. 
My father discovered a poet to do the upholstering for me. 
He was an odd-job upholsterer when he was not a poet, 
and he had a watery eye. When his upholstering was all 
but done, I gave him a piece of beautiful yellow silk, which 
I had picked up at a sale somewhere, to make into a 
portiere. We never saw him again, but he wrote a letter 
saying that he would not have had it happen for anything. 

[207] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

My father supposed that the poor devil had been obsessed 
by thirst when he parted with the silk ; and there was an end 
of it. 

I had to have a large mirror in my room, though the 
aesthetes had declared against the mirrors which were mir- 
rors. My father always said that a lady's room was in- 
complete without a looking-glass, and the more of it the 
better. I compromised by having the gilt frame painted 
blue like the chimneypiece and the woodwork of the room. 
The next thing was a desk, and my father went to Liffey 
Street and bought me a very pretty davenport of walnut 
wood, for which he paid quite a stiff price. Some years 
afterwards, when I was married and that davenport fol- 
lowed me to London, we found a few tarnished silver coins 
in the packing-case. After that, whenever we shook the 
davenport something fell out of it. It took as many posi- 
tions as a contortionist. There came out of it, besides, 
about thirty-five shillings in various blackened coins, a 
beautiful little gold pencil-case, a gold crucifix, a tiny letter- 
scales, a paper-knife, and various other things. For a time 
we looked for a secret drawer, but could find nothing; and 
presently its benefactions came to an end. 

I suppose my books must have been increasing, for my 
father bought me at an auction a second book-case to flank 
my first. The next thing was china. We went to a col- 
lector's sale in Dublin, and I acquired a set of old Crown 
Derby, a gilt corner cupboard, and some books beautifully 
bound. There was a set of William Morris in purple 
morocco, tooled and gilt, for which my father paid without 
a squirm twelve shillings a volume. In those days I had 
practically all I desired, although he had only begun to 
recover from the pinch of the army contracts and the bad 
times. 

[208] 



1886 

I have never, except when I went shopping with my 
father, had the happy feehng that all things were possible 
in the way of acquisition. Since I am about my room, I 
may as well tell of further acquisitions in the following 
winter. A rich old woman had died intestate, the last of 
a family of two brothers and a sister, who were old friends 
of my father. He was appointed by the Courts to ad- 
minister the estate. There was a delightful auction, a real 
country auction, for the roads were hard frozen, and no 
dealers could attend. The old people, like many of their 
sort in Ireland, had been something of collectors. The 
younger brother lived in books to his knees. I remember 
my first introduction to him, when his sister had permitted 
me to ransack his library, and I, up to my eyes in books, 
was startled by a strange hollow voice repeating — 

"My hair is white, but not with years; 
Nor grew it white 
In a single night, 
As men have grown through sudden fears" 

— a very delicate way of introducing himself. It was as 
though to say : "I too have been in Arcady." 

The collection included old china, old glass — some very 
fine pieces of Waterford — old furniture, some bits of lace, 
a couple of Indian shawls, and, since everything was sold, 
the beaver hats and flowered waistcoats in which the old 
brothers had ruffled it in the Thirties, and the delicate 
muslins — short-waisted — in which the old woman had been 
adorable when George the Fourth was king. 

For the duties of administering the estate, which 
amounted to about £60,000, my father received some six 
or seven hundred pounds, and this seemed to him a reason 
why I should buy what I would. Someone had braved 
the elements to buy the Waterford glass at what we thought 

[209] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

then an incredible sum. But I came away from the auction 
the richer by a miscellaneous lot of china, some old 
Worcester in brown with a gold and purple star in the 
centre, a pair of Coalport vases, some Coalport cups and 
saucers, the two Indian shawls, and other miscellaneous 
things. 

Once installed in my pretty room, my friends vied in 
giving me additions to my pretty things, so that presently 
my room was charming. I had a desire to put a verse of 
George Herbert's on the door : 

"A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine; 
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
Makes that and the action fine." 

I mentioned the wish to one of the boys who came to 
the house, and I received in a few days a stencil, a book 
of gold-leaf, size, and a brush, followed by the giver, who 
was as much interested in doing the stencilling for me as 
I was in seeing it done. 

I was so busy about my room that I think the Home 
Rule Bill of 1886 must have passed by me without affecting 
me much. Perhaps its defeat was a certainty, for I remem- 
ber no anticipation regarding it among those among whom 
I lived. Only English friends who were tending towards 
the Union of Hearts, wrote to me of their excitement over 
the Bill and its fate. 

Now that I had my room I was free to entertain my 
friends as I would. My verses began to attract some atten- 
tion in America, an attention which, I am sorry to say, 
has not continued. I suppose it must have been through 
the verses, for I cannot remember any other way, that Mrs. 
Alexander Sullivan of Chicago came to see me in that sum- 
mer of 1886. The tragic occurrence of some years earlier 

[210] 




Sir Samuel Ferguson 



John Bovle O'Reilly 



1886 

when her husband had shot dead a man who offered her 
some rudeness as she was leaving a carriage, was still fresh 
in people's minds. Sullivan was connected with the revo- 
lutionary party in America, although at that time there was 
no general knowledge of that fact. I think, perhaps, she 
came to me through John Boyle O'Reilly, of the Boston 
Pilot, for which I was then writing, or through his sub- 
editor, Miss Katharine Conway. 

Mrs. Sullivan was the most American of Americans. I 
had been told that she was the greatest woman- journalist 
in the world, and I quite believed it. I am sure she believed 
it herself. She has now been dead for many years, so I 
can speak without danger of hurting anyone. In my mem- 
ory of her she was a fresh-coloured (or would have been 
fresh-coloured if she had not been an American), grey- 
eyed, dark-haired woman with a very masterful and self- 
assertive manner. She talked as she wrote, ponderously, 
and she dealt in large figures. For instance, when she was 
writing a syndicate letter for a New York Agency, she 
would say that she represented seven thousand American 
newspapers, or something of that sort ; and she was always 
talking about the Tariff, and her stenographer, and other 
things which I knew nothing at all about, and found rather 
dull than awe-inspiring, 

I had a boundless spirit of adventure in those days, 1 
never paused to ask myself if the adventure was going to 
be dull or lively, so long as it was concerned with a person 
who was a personage. The Dublin newspapers of a Na- 
tionalist type had told me that Mrs. Sullivan was a per- 
sonage. She had certainly a personality, but I found it a 
tiresome one. 

She asked me to pay her a short visit at the Shelbourne 
Hotel, where she was staying with a couple of young Ameri- 

[2II] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

can ladies under her wing. She and I went out shopping. 
It was very dull shopping. She wanted a handbag or some- 
thing of the sort. She had purchased it. The price was, 
I think, twenty shillings. On hearing who his customer 
was, the man, in the unpractical Irish way, beamed. 

"Oh, madam," he said, "I've read about you in the 
Freeman's Journal this morning. I am honoured to have 
had such a distinguished customer. Please allow me to 
make a slight alteration in the price. Let the bag be fifteen 
shillings — to you." 

"No, sir; no," she said, in the manner of Sarah Siddons, 
"that is not the way we do business in America. I insist 
that you shall treat me the same as any other customer. Not 
one penny of your price shall you abate." 

I was reminded of this incident when some years later, 
after the closing of the Paris Exhibition at which she had 
again represented her American syndicate, she told that a 
great firm of American jewellers had sent her a jewel, and 
how she had refused it with lofty scorn. It was a counsel 
of perfection to weaker vessels, who would have argued that 
after all the gift was not a bribe, since all she had to say 
about the exhibition was done and over. 

I spent just one night with her in the Shelbourne Hotel, 
and I remember nothing of it except that we sat in Mrs. 
Sullivan's bedroom and pretended (at least I pretended) 
to be prodigiously amused over the pronunciations in a 
Dutch phrase-book. That we did not sit in the lounge or 
even the ladies' drawing-room must have been, I think, a 
part of the extraordinary American prudery which exists, 
or existed, side by side with great freedom. I remember 
driving in a cab next day when we might have driven on 
an outside car, and my piteous assurances that ladies did 
now really drive on outside cars, and Mrs. Sullivan's dis- 

[212] 



1886 

belief that such a practice could obtain. Between the Dutch 
phrases I had to tell comic Irish stories, and as I was in 
that state of mind in which you feel your own smile to be 
a contortion of the visage, it took no light resolution to 
keep up the part of humourist. 

The next day we went down to Lusk to see a schoolmaster 
who had written some stories, and had had some corre- 
spondence with Mrs. Sullivan. On arrival at the station, 
Mrs. Sullivan ascertained the time of the next train return- 
ing, and announced triumphantly: ''Girls, we can give 

five minutes to getting there, ten to Mr. H , and five 

to getting back here." 

I shall never forget poor Mr. H 's face when he heard 

that he had ten minutes in which to show us the Round 
Tower, and explain the antiquities of the place. The table 

in the little parlour was set for a banquet : Mrs. H 

emerged from the kitchen very flushed, and with the at- 
mosphere of a great dinner about her : the schoolmaster, 
a sensitive-looking young man with fair, delicate skin, 
coloured and blinked when this announcement was made. 
All the poor things' preparations and anticipations were in 
ruins. I stayed behind a second, nearly losing the train 
thereby, to say I was sorry, that I wished we might have 
stayed. I remember that he blinked again rapidly, almost 
as though a tear were not far away. 

My friendship with the Yeats family must have begun 
at that time, for I brought Mrs. Sullivan to Mr. Yeats's 
studio in Stephen's Green, where there used to be a great 
foregathering in those days. Miss Fanny Gallaher, a Dub- 
lin notability of those days, who had written two or three 
novels, came in while we were there. I listened to her 
and Mrs. Sullivan talking, as though to a Battle of the 
[Wits. Mrs. Sullivan was really a witty woman when she 

[213] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

allowed her wit to have play. Mr. Yeats talked about his 
theories of painting. He was a dear, delightful, unpractical 
artist. Just then he was engaged in painting all his friends 
for nothing, till a lady came with a business proposition, 
whose face he disliked. Whereupon he fled to London till 
the business proposition was forgotten. 

He talked of art and its mission. Mrs. Sullivan said: 
"Sir, your patrons would tell you that you had not to con- 
sider your mission, but your commission." 

There was also a Danish painter who had only one word 
of English, and that was "body-colour." Mr. Yeats had no 
Danish naturally, but they seemed to get along very well 
together on that one word of communication. 

A good many happy memories centre round that studio. 
Everybody who was anybody in Dublin, or visiting Dublin, 
seemed to find his or her way there at one time or another. 
It was a delightful place, its atmosphere permeated by the 
personality of Mr. J. B. Yeats, the quaintest and most charm- 
ing of men. 

Canvases were stacked everywhere round the walls. 
They were used to conceal many things — the little kitchen 
and tea-table arrangement at one end, Mr. Yeats's slippers 
and the dressing-room of the family. I am bound to say 
that Mr. Yeats's slippers refused to be concealed. They 
would come walking out from under the canvases, in all 
shades of shabbiness, as though they had feet inside them. 

Some time in the summer of 1886 I began to sit to him 
for a portrait, and I sat one or two days a week for quite 
a long time. Other painters used to implore me to cut the 
sittings short, saying that Mr. Yeats would over-paint the 
picture and spoil it. However, I suppose the occasions were 
too delightful to me, or I had not the strength of mind to 
interfere with the painter's plans. Anyhow the painting 

[214] 



1886 

went on till it was time for the picture to be exhibited at 
the Royal Hibernian Academy Exhibition of 1887. 

It was a happy period when I had worlds enough and 
time; and as for the painter, he had always worlds enough 
and time to do the things he liked. He used to complain 
about my "fringe" being cut — we all went befringed at 
that time. "You've been cutting that fringe of yours 
again,'' he would growl. "Why can't you let it alone?" 
Miss Sarah Purser was present on one of these occasions, 
and defended me characteristically. 

"Why, Mr. Yeats, if she did not have it cut it would be 
hanging about her feet by this time," she said. 

Mr. Yeats did not spoil the portrait by over-painting. I 
believe it ranks among his best portraits. It is now in the 
Dublin Municipal Art Gallery, one day to take its place 
in the National Portrait Gallery. Sir Hugh Lane begged 
it from its place among my household gods with his usual 
unashamed greediness where pictures are concerned. I re- 
fused at first, but after its existence had been endangered 
by a fire, I gave it. I believe I always wanted to give it, 
because I felt that my father would have been so proud 
if he could have lived to see it where it hangs — where it 
will hang. 



[215] 



CHAPTER XVIII 

1886-87 

My friendship with the Yeats family brought a new and 
full interest into my life, and was the beginning of many 
other interests, wherefore I have always said that the best 
of my life was yet to be after I had passed my twenty-first 
year. 

Let me recall those days in the studio. I used to come 
in about eleven or twelve o'clock in the morning and sit till 
lunch time. At various moments in the morning the Yeats 
girls and Willie would arrive, one at a time; and during 
the sitting there was a continuous stream of visitors. Mr. 
Yeats never found any visitor or any amount of talking a 
distraction from his work. His visitors, perhaps, were only 
of the right kind, or it may have been that they were made 
right by his extraordinary interest in his kind. He did 
not dislike many people. Those I have heard him express 
dislike of were generally the peevish, unsympathetic wives 
of men he was fond of, who, having out-distanced him in 
the race for prosperity — where indeed he never was a run- 
ner — still loved excursions into Bohemia and were held 
back by their women-folk. 

I do not know why he did not dislike more people, for he 
was of the irritable race; but I think it must have been 
that he kept entirely aloof from those who did not interest 
him, so that the only chance people had of being disagree- 
able to him was if they happened to belong to people he 
did like. 

While he painted he walked to and from the picture in- 
cessantly, talking or drawing on the sitter to talk. I do 

[216] 



1886-87 

not know what he would have done if he had had a silent 
sitter. He might have had an interesting but silent one, 
like Miss May Sinclair or the late Katharine Cecil Thurston, 
or dear Lionel Johnson; but perhaps they would not have 
been silent with him. 

Willie Yeats was always about the studio. He had not 
ceased at that time to be an art student, although he was 
writing poetry. He used to be very quiet in a corner doing 
some work of his own, and ever willing to do anything 
he was asked to do for others. He was very gentle, simple, 
and generous. He asked you to be profoundly interested 
in his poetry. On the other hand, he was always pro- 
foundly interested in yours. He would read his poetry to 
you for hours, if you would allow it; on the other hand, he 
would listen for hours, absorbed in yours, if you chose to 
absorb him. He was a wonderful critic. At that time he 
was apt, I think, to be over-generous to the work of those 
whom he liked. He asked from poetry something of sin- 
cerity, of truth, of character and personality, and he would 
make the beauty for himself. 

If you brought him a new poem he would chant it over to 
himself with his head on one side. Nearly always one was 
surprised by the generosity of his admiration. 

He would be at work quietly in his corner painting, per- 
haps, or perhaps only cleaning his father's brushes or 
palette. When the time came for the midday light lunch 
he was always at hand to fill the kettle, to go out to buy 
bread or milk or anything else that was wanted. Once 
he was very quiet for a long time in his corner. At last 
his father asked, "What are you doing, Willie?" "I'm 
trying to get the paint off my coat with turpentine, but it 
won't come off," said the poet. "I've been at it for an 
hour, but it seems only to get worse." "Where did you 

[217] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

find the turpentine?" "In this can." "Oh, but that is oil !" 

Sometimes after lunch, in a quiet hour, Willie would read 
poetry for us. I heard Chapman's Homer in that way. 
Once I nodded, and would have dropped asleep if I had not 
laughed. After that I had my early afternoon cup of tea 
to keep me wakeful. 

Sometimes during the sitting a knock would come to the 
door. Mr. Yeats would go to it, and there would be a col- 
loquy, ending in the visitor's being sent away. It was usu- 
ally someone who was paying for his or her portrait, and 
wanted a sitting, who was thus rejected. 

Occasionally I stayed the night at the Yeats's house on 
the outskirts of Dublin. I used to be awakened in the night 
by a steady, monotonous sound rising and falling. It was 
Willie chanting poetry to himself in the watches of the 
night. 

He never had the remotest idea of taking care of himself. 
He would go all day without food unless someone remem- 
bered it for him, and in the same way would go on eating 
unless someone checked him. That first winter, a hard 
one, he would come to see me, five miles from Dublin, 
striding along over the snow-bound roads, a gaunt young 
figure, mouthing poetry, swinging his arms and gesticulat- 
ing as he went. George Russell complained to me the other 
day that Willie Yeats had said somewhere of him, and 
printed it, that he used to walk about the streets of Dub- 
lin swinging his arms like a flail, unconscious of the alarm 
and bewilderment of the passers-by. It was Willie's own 
case. I remember how the big Dublin policemen used to 
eye him in those days, as though uncertain whether to "run 
him in" or not. But, by and by, they used to say, "Shure, 
'tisn't mad he is, nor yet drink taken. 'Tis the poethry 
that's disturbin' his head," and leave him alone. 

[218] 



1886-87 

Once he had a very bad cough — he very often had a 
cough or a cold from his inabiHty to take care of himself. 
I was sorry for him, and I bestowed upon him some cough 
lozenges which contained opium or chlorodyne or both, 
with instructions to suck one two or three times a day. 
He ate through the whole box at a sitting, and thereafter 
slept for some thirty hours. Fortunately he awoke none 
the worse, else I should have done a very ill service to the 
world. 

There were moments when poetry ceased to charm others, 
but never him. He was always ready to squire me any- 
where I would. I remember one very wet night, after we 
had been to a meeting of the Protestant Home Rule Asso- 
ciation, when we waited in Westmoreland Street for a tram ; 
I in my smart clothes, my high-heeled French shoes, stand- 
ing in a pool of water; the wind- driving the rain as it 
does only in a sea-bound city; Willie holding the umbrella 
at an acute and absent-minded angle which could shelter 
nobody, pouring the while into my ears The Sensitive 
Plant. It was a moment to try any woman's temper, and 
mine did not stand the trial well. 

One day while I was sitting, John O'Leary came into the 
studio. He had come back to Dublin after serving five 
years of his twenty years' sentence in Portland, and living 
in Paris under sentence of banishment for the remaining 
fifteen. He had come back to Ireland to spend the sunset 
of his life. 

He had said very good things of my poetry, and I was 
well prepared to like him. Besides, we all knew of him as a 
man of stainless honour, an idealist. "We are not a trans- 
acting party," he used to say of himself and his Fenians; 
as though anyone could suspect transactions from men 
whose leader had absolutely no use for opportunism. 

[219] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

He had come back to Ireland with a splendid white head, 
who had left it black as a raven. His convictions were 
quite unchanged. He was as much of a revolutionary as 
ever, and he made no secret of it. Perhaps the English 
Government could afford to disregard a revolutionary whose 
ideals were snow-white. It is not easy to carry a revolu- 
tion white-handed. 

He soon gathered about him a little circle that loved him. 
I think, as a rule, that women loved him better than men, 
except the few, for whereas he was gentle with women, he 
was apt to sweep away scornfully the opinions of a man 
who disagreed with him. He used to tell people that they 
were "faultlessly ignorant of everything under the sun" ; 
and his adjuration in argument, "Good God, man, what the 
devil do you know about it?" occasionally caused an ag- 
grieved feeling. 

He was a fine, splendid, heroic old man: and he had a 
sister as fine, splendid, and heroic as himself. Both were 
splendid to look at, with fine aquiline features and eyes 
stainless as the sun, that sent sharp radiant glances, keen 
as a sword. 

It was perhaps natural that I had the stronger personal 
liking for the brother. As he kept his softness for women, 
she kept hers, perhaps, for men. She was one of the women 
friends to whom I have shown only one side of my charac- 
ter, being a little afraid of their rigidity towards the other 
side. She never suspected there was another side. 

I saw a good deal of the O'Learys at that time, and often 
stayed a night at their house when I had some evening 
engagement that prevented my getting home. The rela- 
tionship between brother and sister was idyllic. He was 
to her the incarnation of all things chivalrous and high- 

[ 220 ] 




T. D. Sullivan 



1886-87 

minded. Many of her simple and beautiful poems, true 
love-poems, were addressed to him: 

"Home, home at last from long years of exile 
He comes, my peerless and fearless knight 
With a dauntless front and a stainless record, 
But time and trial have bleached him white." 

I feel now that my youth was privileged in my being 
taken into friendship and affection by souls so lofty as these. 
I do not believe that they had one thought ignoble or selfish, 

John O'Leary was extraordinarily frank. One almost 
smiled at the thought of anyone so frank being a con- 
spirator; but doubtless he was only frank with those he 
trusted. There was just one subject he never spoke of, 
and that, characteristically, was his imprisonment. He was 
not troubled with the "impure passion" of self-pity; 
although one could well imagine what five years at Port- 
land must have meant to such a one; and one marvels at 
the greatness of human nature that brought him out snow- 
white in heart and mind from such an experience. About 
his great moments he was reticent. Thus was his speech in 
the dock : 

"I have been found guilty of treason or treason-felony. 
Treason is a foul crime. The poet Dante consigned traitors 
to, I believe, the ninth circle of hell. But what kind of 
traitors? Traitors against king, against country, against 
friends, against benefactors. England is not my country; 
I have betrayed no friend, no benefactor. Sidney and 
Emmet were legal traitors. Jeffreys was a loyal man and 
so was Norbury. I leave the matter at that." 

There was something about brother and sister which I 
can best describe by the word virginal. I am not sure that 
Ellen O'Leary was not the more masculine of the two. 
What are illusions to other people were the simple realities 

L221] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

of life to them. What matter that life had dealt hardly 
with them? that the brother, being made of the finest ma- 
terial God works in, served in his life five years of hell, 
fifteen of exile: came home at last for a brief season of 
happiness to the sister who, having waited for him for 
twenty years, welcomed him with the seeds of a mortal dis- 
ease in her breast ? What matter if their opinions were out 
of date? What matter if New Tipperary took from them 
the little wealth Fenianism had left them, so that they were 
poor in their old age? There they were, idealists through 
and through, believing greatly, hoping greatly, loving 
greatly. Again I thank God for the inestimable privilege 
of such friendships in my impressionable youth. 

I remember a girl, who was not at all impressionable, 
quite outside the circle, saying at her first meeting with 
Ellen O'Leary, curiously: "She's a very ^raw(/-looking 
person." She was grand-looking. The sober lace cap of 
elderliness, above her richly tinted aquiline face and the 
abundant dark hair, became her like a crown. By the way, 
her large eyelids and the serene width between her brows 
made her so far resemble Christina Rossetti. The rest of 
her face was more dominant, far more robust, and of the 
open air. 

John O'Leary had had his innocent love-story. He told 
it to Rose Kavanagh, another beloved friend of those days, 
and she told it to me. In his youth he and his bosom friend 
had had the misfortune to fall in love with the same girl. 
Since she could not choose between them she escaped the 
hard choice by slipping from them both into a convent. 
"How did you feel about it?" Rose Kavanagh asked him. 
"For a good while," he said briefly, "I was in hell." 

On the walls of their sitting-room there hung the por- 
traits of their father and mother — he with the ruffled shirt, 

[ 222 ] 



1886-87 

the green body-coat and buff waistcoat of the Thirties, a 
bunch of seals at his fob; high-coloured, clean-shaven, his 
hair brushed up to a stiff point at the top ; she in silks, with 
a high lace cap and lappets below the chin, obviously per- 
sons of breeding, of consideration. John O'Leary would 
have said probably that he sprang from the higher 
bourgeoisie; but there was blood and breeding in brother 
and sister as there was in the portraits. 

We girls never minded when John O'Leary said to us, 
with a half-laugh : "Good God in Heaven, ye've no 
morale." "Morale" was a great word of his. Indeed, I 
am not sure that some of us did not lay ourselves out to 
capture that half-laugh and the sharp kind look which told 
that it was not in him to be untender to a woman. Once 
I incurred his sister's scorn; it was in the days of Nihilist 
outrages — ^by saying that if I were Czar I should clear 
out and have a happy life as an English country gentle- 
man. In the same way she objected to a poem of Rosa 
Mulholland's which made Sarah Curran declare herself 
jealous of Emmet's love for his country, her rival. Per- 
haps Ellen O'Leary had never been in love. Indeed, I 
rather think she had not, the passion for her brother having 
sufficed her. Hard counsels of perfection for another were 
easy and natural to her. 

She was as prudish as she was tolerant. I don't think she 
would have smiled at a broad story, however amusing, 
and I remember that she was shocked when I called a tea- 
pot "pot-bellied," which it was. At the same time she had 
no more condemnation than her brother had for sinners 
against the moral code, that is "moral'' in its narrowest 
sense. I have often observed in men of particular virtue 
an incredible tolerance for the vices of others. Indeed I 
have observed it particularly in two or three saints I have 

[223] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

known. It explains, perhaps, the tolerance for the vices 
of persons in high places which so often obtained in the 
Middle Ages. I remember when the days of the Parnell 
Divorce case and the debacle came John O'Leary's fierce 
comment, "Good God in Heaven, you can't depose a man 
for gallantry," using the word in its French sense. 

Neither brother nor sister had any sympathy with the 
Land League, and I doubt indeed that the movement satis- 
fied anybody who possessed ideals. But it had to come, as 
Mr. Parnell said when he found it the weapon to his hand, 
and it had to go before better things could come, which 
by the way is not yet. John O'Leary interviewed Mr. 
Parnell after he came back to Dublin, or Mr. Parnell inter- 
viewed him. They fell apart at that time, but when the split 
happened John O'Leary and his hillsider-men, with all that 
was honest in Irish Nationalism, stood at Parnell's back. 

However, all that was in the hidden future. For the 
time John O'Leary was the centre of a little circle of poets, 
politicians, painters, makers of all sorts, to whom he could 
be mentor and critic. He was a voluminous reader, as 
well known among the book-shops of Paris as he was in 
those latter days among the old book-shops on the quays 
of Dublin. He had been a book-buyer and a book-reader 
all his life. In Paris, by the way, he had been for a time 
a house-mate of Whistler and Swinburne. Apparently it 
had not been a harmonious household. I seem to remem- 
ber that John O'Leary talked in his tolerant way of 
Whistler's being as vain as a peacock. That was a very 
prudish age in Ireland. In fact before the Parnell Divorce 
case set everyone to talking about it there was an extraordi- 
nary reticence about matters of sex. It used to startle us, 
brought up in this reticence, to hear John, still more Ellen, 

[224] 



1886-87 

O'Leary talking of Frenchmen of letters^ with a sudden 
reference to So-and-So's mistress. 

I don't think we ever smiled at Ellen O'Leary. I think 
it is an essential part of a certain tender kind of love that 
you must smile sometimes at the object of it. We often 
smiled — I often smile to this day — at John O'Leary. Here 
is a characteristic story of him. Sometime — it must have 
been after Mr. Parnell's death — he met with Mr. John 
Redmond, who had been doing something he disliked. He 
took him for Mr. Willie Redmond, which I think was a 
common mistake in those days. I know I made it myself. 

"You're all right," he said; "you're all right. I've 
nothing against you. But, good God in Heaven, what 
does that brother of yours mean by making such an ass 
of himself?" 

"Mr. O'Leary, are you not mistaking me for my brother 
WilHe?" 

"Oh, I was, I was," John O'Leary returned, quite un- 
abashed. "What the devil do you mean by being so like 
your brother?" 

Another incident took place one evening he was in my 
house after my marriage. Another guest the same evening 
was a young Cork barrister against whom John O'Leary 
had some grievance. He had ignored the young Cork- 
man's extended hand when he came in, and had ignored 
all the civilities offered by the same during the evening. 
My Corkman took a humorous view of it ; he was a tricksy 
sprite if ever there was one. We played cards, and the 
hour grew late. The night was very dark; in front of the 
house was a precipice and the sea; all about were rocks 
and the sea : the surroundings were much too dangerous 
for John O'Leary, then in his decline, to face unguarded. 
My Corkman took charge of him to the station ; helped him 

[225 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

down the steep steps with tender assiduity; gave him an 
arm, helped him up other steep steps, into the tram. Out 
again ; took his railway ticket : put him in the train, having 
found him a corner seat, and waited cheerfully on the wind- 
swept platform to see the train depart. He came back to 
us with a smile which had a touch of ruefulness in its 
humour. "He never said one word to me," he said, "till 
the train was going off; and then he put his head out and 
called back to me, 'I hate the smooth crookedness of the 
Corkman !' " 

John O'Leary was always snipping bits out of papers 
and magazines which he thought would interest his young 
friends, and sending them on to us. Like many people 
of high moral rectitude he disregarded post-office rules, 
and used to send whole sheaves of clippings enclosed in- 
side newspapers. They always passed, it being Ireland. 
Perhaps one had a friend at the post-office. Department 
rules are not, or used not to be, rigid in Ireland. They 
used to say that letters coming to a country post-office 
were read first by the post-mistress, next by the parish 
priest, in turn by the police-sergeant, and maybe a week 
after the letter had arrived, someone would say, meeting 
another on the road, "I hear there's a letter for you at 
the post-office below and a bit of an order in it from your 
daughter Bride, in America." Indeed, only yesterday a 
parson told me that in the country town where he was 
curate, he heard all the news of the place from the people 
who gathered below his window for the nightly parliament. 
One night he heard that the brother of a neighbouring 
gentleman who was shooting in Scotland had accidentally 
been shot in the face. He heard all the circumstances of 
the tale told with great dramatic effect. Next morning 
he went to tender his sympathy. "It is quite true, but how 

[226] 



1886-87 

did you know it? We only heard it ourselves last night, 
late." But everyone in the village had known before that. 

John O'Leary used to get more into a post-card than any 
other man I ever knew. I have quantities of his letters and 
his voluminous post-cards. I shall quote a few of his 
letters in another place ; but indeed my correspondence of 
that time is so full, that it would take many volumes to 
give even a representation to many names which were 
famous, or destined to be famous. Those years onward 
from 1886 were very happy years for me. I had found 
myself. Friendships were springing up on every side. My 
father was inordinately pleased with me, and did all he 
could to make life run easily for me. I had emerged from 
the class to which poetry meant little or nothing — the middle 
class is the same everywhere — and I had formed a little 
circle of my own. There were always two sets of guests 
in those days at the Sunday parties which were a feature 
of my old home. There were my friends and my sisters' 
friends. My friends used to gather in the little room my 
father's love had made beautiful. We used to talk litera- 
ture endlessly. There was a lull in politics with the Home 
Rule Bill of 1886 over and done with — the Union of Hearts 
an accomplished fact, and the ardour of that Union daily 
growing greater. Those prosperities do not appeal to poets 
and idealists. 

My sisters' friends used to play tennis on summer Sun- 
day afternoons and cards in the evening. The Catholic 
Celt having done his duty to his Creator on Sundays con- 
siders himself privileged to amuse himself as he will, and 
would reply to anyone who objected to playing cards on 
a Sunday or dancing or anything else in the way of harm- 
less amusement, "The better the day the better the deed." 

They were very delightful Sundays all round, but the 

[227] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

cleavage between my visitors and my sisters' visitors was 
complete. My sisters' visitors did things all day long, from 
the tennis in the afternoon to the cards and perhaps the 
dancing in the evening. My visitors talked incessantly — 
of books and art and movements. Their visitors thought 
my visitors dull, looking at them much as the sporting 
Celt looks at the dull Irish Protestant; which is not at all 
to say that my visitors were wholly non-Celtic or non- 
Catholic. Doubtless my visitors looked on my sisters' vis- 
itors as so many young barbarians enjoying themselves in 
their unintellectual fashion; till the Parnell Split came to 
link us all up, and politics were the devouring excitement 
of the house. 

My father used to sit in the dining-room surrounded 
by a group of young men — perhaps an old one like Mr. 
Yeats or John O'Leary, his face shining as he listened to 
the discussions. I really believe that like myself he had 
come to his own in those days. 

I remember Mr. Yeats saying on one occasion — or was 
it Mr. Richard Ashe King? — that my old home, White-" 
hall, could have no counterpart amongst the farmhouses 
of Ireland, to which John O'Leary replied, "Certainly not, 
so far as this room is concerned." But I think the wider 
application would have been true. It was unlikely that to 
any farmhouse came the notables of my Sunday afternoons. 
I smile now to think of the haphazard way those Sundays 
were managed. My sisters asked whom they would, and 
I asked whom I would. If the table in the dining-room 
was not large enough to contain those who came there 
was an overflow meeting in the parlour. We always man- 
aged to get them in somehow and to feed them. We had 
often twenty people to that meal, which took place at the 
barbarous hour of 4.30 or so in the afternoon. We were 

[ 228 ] 



1886-87 

not greatly concerned as to what we ate or when we ate. 
The Irish priests of to-day still eat their principal meal at 
4 o'clock; and at that time, I fancy, the fixture in Irish 
Catholic houses was more or less influenced by the priests, 
who were much in the social life. I think we used to court 
disaster by the haphazard way in which we launched our 
separate invitations : but I do not remember that the disas- 
ter ever came. People sometimes stayed away by a happy 
chance. But Sunday night often saw the larder as bare as 
Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The whole thing would have 
given an English housekeeper or a responsible Irish one 
(if there was such a thing at that date) fits. It worked 
out extremely well. I don't think anyone went away 
hungry or thirsty, although we had very often an extremely 
scratch breakfast on Monday morning. 



[229] 



CHAPTER XIX 

CHIEFLY ROSE KAVANAGH 

1887 found me completely launched on the literary life, 
despising those joys which had hitherto but ill contented me. 
I gave up dancing from about that date, as being unsuited 
to my loftier way of thinking, and when I attended a ball 
I sat out or strolled about in the corridors feeling vastly 
superior. The big entertainments I went to in 1887 and 
the following years were mainly political, in their origin 
at all events. In those years the Union of Hearts was 
closest, and Dublin was entertaining Liberal Home Rulers 
with characteristic fervour. Mr. T. D. Sullivan was Lord 
Mayor in 1887, and we were all as Gladstonian as we 
could possibly be. At one of the Lord Mayor's entertain- 
ments I met Mr. Wilfred Blunt, whom I admired very 
much and found very handsome and romantic, with a look 
at once proud and shy, something of the desert grace of 
his own Arabs about him. 

Politics in Ireland were quiet enough for the moment. 
Of course meetings were interfered with, and Mr. William 
O'Brien was thrown into prison. We had a great sensa- 
tion when he was reported to be dying in jail, and the 
Lord Mayor sent a message to Mr. Balfour at the Chief 
Secretary's Lodge, late at night, demanding his release. 
The messenger was White, the Mansion House butler, who 
was always known in Dublin as the Permanent Lord Mayor. 
He had been handed down by generations of Conservative 
Lord Mayors ; and he had a very poor opinion of the popu- 
lar regime at the Mansion House. He was a self- 
constituted Master of Ceremonies to the Lady Mayoresses, 
and used to countermand their carriages, and deny their 

[230] 



CHIEFLY ROSE KAVANAGH 

visitors, if they came at a time he did not approve of. 
"Lady So-and-So never drove at this hour," he would say, 
or as he said to myself on one occasion, "The Lady Mayor- 
ess is never at home after six o'clock" ; and when I urged 
that I was specially bidden for that hour, "All I can say 
is I've heard nothing about it," gently but firmly closing 
the door in my face. It must have been painful to White, 
who was a staunch Conservative, to go waking up the 
Chief Secretary's Lodge at midnight upon what he doubt- 
less considered a very trumpery errand. He came back 
with a cock-and-bull story of the door being opened to him 
by a gentleman wearing a star on his breast, who treated 
the matter lightly. Everyone was in a ferment of indig- 
nation, or pretended to be; and it was supposed that Mr. 
Balfour himself came down wearing his decorations to scoff 
at the Lord Mayor's ambassador. It turned out after all 
to have been only Mr. Hayes Fisher wearing a blazer with 
the arms of his College worked on it. It was a very pretty 
situation for a comic opera, that visit of White to the Chief 
Secretary's Lodge, although I am far from saying that 
Mr. O'Brien's illness had anything comic about it. 

However, I am not going to set down here things which 
are not reminiscences proper, and I ask pardon for my 
digression. Except for social purposes I was out of politics 
just then. Mr. Parnell was doing nothing that I can re- 
member. It was the season of his lying low; and the 
political horizon seems in my memory of it uninteresting, 
being empty of him, perhaps by contrast with the glorious 
living of the days that were to come after the Split, To 
hark back I remember one night in 1884, or it may have 
been 1885, when, coming home late from the House of 
Commons with some friends, the party being in charge of 
Mr. Timothy Harrington, we encountered a cloaked and 

[231 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

hooded figure that glided by us in the shadows somewhere 
about the top of Northumberland Avenue, "That is Mr. 
Parnell," said Timothy Harrington. "None of us knows 
where he lives, and he takes care we shall not know." 

I lost my capacity for being an ardent Gladstonian by the 
fact that when I wrote a Home Rule poem and published 
it in United Ireland, having sent it to Mr. Gladstone, I 
received only a formal acknowledgment from Sir Henry 
Primrose addressed to Katharine Tynan, Esq. I was sorry 
then I had written the poem. 

Let me see what friendships 1887 brought me. There 
was Rose Kavanagh. I had known her long before 1887, 
but had hardly become friends till 1886. When first I 
met her she was in the ofiice of the Irishman acting as a 
sub-editor to the famous Pigott. I think I must have come 
to the office on literary business — for there was a story- 
paper attached to the Irishman, and afterwards to United 
Ireland, called the Shamrock, which, though a wretched 
little rag to look at, was a good commercial property and 
could pay its contributors. The fortunes of the Shamrock 
rose and fell with the fortunes of "Mick M'Quaid," a sort 
of stage Irishman, whose adventures in all sorts of posi- 
tions were told by one Lynam. "Mick M'Quaid" went on 
endlessly. He was in that respect like Black Bess, or the 
Knights of the Road, a serial which I used to see in the 
servants' hands in my babyhood from which some thrilling 
bits were imparted to the children. That serial I under- 
stood had begun to unroll itself in the eighteenth century, 
not long after Turpin and the other gentlemen expiated 
their sins against society on the scaffold, and was still un- 
rolling merrily in the sixties of the nineteenth century. 
William O'Brien tried to stop "Mick M'Quaid" many 
times. He had no tolerance for the stage Irishman, but 

[232] 



I^^^HP^ %^^^^H 




^Bk^^ ■ '-^^^^^^1 


l^^^^^^^^^gM^^^H^^^^^I^H 



John O'Leary 




Dr Douglas Hyde 
(.hi Craoihliiu AoibJiinn) 




Ei.LEN O'Leary 



CHIEFLY ROSE KAVANAGH 

every time Mick was dropped the circulation dropped; so 
that long after Mick's creator was gathered to his fathers 
Mick had to be resuscitated and started off on new ad- 
ventures which were the old. 

Perhaps Rose Kavanagh was editing the Shamrock, and 
I had some business of a Christmas poem or story. She 
used to write poetry and stories herself, the poetry often 
very felicitous, as the expression of a most sincere and 
brave spirit. 

She lived at that time under the same roof with Charles 
Kickham, the blind poet and novelist, a Fenian of the same 
ideal way of thinking and acting as John O'Leary. I re- 
member Rose quite well talking of "Mr. Kickham," but I 
cannot recall anything definite she said about him. Per- 
haps her North of Ireland blood gave her a curious cau- 
tion and reticence. I cannot remember that I ever heard 
her speak of Pigott, although she must have had lots to 
impart if she would. But just about the time when every- 
one was talking of Pigott's exposure and the burst up of 
the conspiracy I said to her, "Wasn't Pigott like a rat in 
a trap?" She smiled and said, "A fine fat rat"; nothing 
more than that. 

She came one Sunday in 1886 with Dr. Sigerson and his 
two daughters to see me. I believe I had met Dr. Sigerson 
at the O'Learys' house a few evenings before. I remember 
.the summer Sunday quite well. Mr. Yeats and his 
daughters were with us the same day. I had hitherto only 
seen Rose Kavanagh in a dingy office and in winter. On 
that summer day I had a better opportunity of discovering 
how charming and interesting she was. She was a tall 
girl, with a fair skin which had a shade of brown in it. 
She had very fine, fearless grey eyes, white teeth, waving 
brown hair, and a most honest look. She was one of the 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

very few people I have met who, being entirely an idealist, 
was not too bright or good for her fellows. I know I 
shared my follies with her for the years of our friendship 
as well as anything else I possessed, and I was never afraid 
of her judgment. I have usually known to whom I might 
display my follies, and have been content to show a half- 
life and nature to those whose judgments might not be kind. 

Rose, alas, had been hampered from the beginning by a 
weak chest. It was a thousand pities, for she had a fine, 
bright spirit, and the look of boyishness about her did not 
belie her. She was of a beautiful peasant type, and her 
speech with its certain Northern burr fitted her dear face 
well. 

It was perhaps some time in 1887 that there came what 
might have been a little trial to our friendship if it had 
not been as true as it was. Mrs. Dwyer Gray, the wife of 
the proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, had started a little 
story-paper, The Irish Pireside. At first she edited it her- 
self, but presently she wanted someone to take the burden 
off her shoulders. A friend who was in the office wrote to 
me suggesting that I should see Mrs. Gray. The salary 
was, I think, about £150 a year, which seemed a big sum 
to me at the time, and I should have delighted in the work. 
I rushed off to my interview with Mrs. Gray, but, enter- 
ing the office, met my friend there, who told me that Mrs. 
Gray had engaged Rose Kavanagh. I turned about and 
went home with a blank feeling, but I think I came out of 
it all right, for, having winked away my tears, I wrote a 
letter of congratulation to Rose, saying that I would not 
have thought of the position for myself if I had known 
she wanted it. I quite appreciate the fact now that she was 
a much better editor than I should have made, though she 
was less literary than I; for the valuable part of her work 

[ 234 ] 



CHIEFLY ROSE KAVANAGH 

consisted in the circle for boys and girls which she made 
a feature of the paper, in which she taught the children 
a pure patriotism, courage, self-dependence, truth, mercy; 
the qualities of her own brave and beautiful heart. 

From that time she was installed on a floor of the news- 
paper office in Middle Abbey Street. She had a couple of 
rooms, and the front room was a delightful rendezvous for 
her friends. I always think of the streets as swept with 
sleet outside, the sticky mud underfoot, which is a feature 
of wintry Dublin. There used to be a roaring fire and a 
big screen. If you did not find Rose at home you simply 
sat at the fire and amused yourself with books or papers 
till she came in, her muffler swathed up about her mouth. 
It may not have been winter outside always, but the winter 
only made it more delightful inside. 

I remember one day she came in and told me that under 
the portico of the General Post Office she had met an old 
man who was anxious about posting a letter and did not 
know which of the several slits to drop it into. 

"You have a good, country face," he said, "not like them 
city people that do be humbuggin' an ould man. Will you 
tell me where to post a letter to my girsha in America?" 
She was greatly pleased with the little incident. 

She had a great capacity for hero-worship. She had been 
passionately devoted to Kickham, and had learnt when deaf- 
ness was added to his blindness to talk to him on his fingers. 
She looked at her very sweetest when she was talking the 
finger alphabet, as I saw her doing for another deaf person. 
Miss Charlotte Grace O'Brien, sometime in 1887. Rose's 
head on one side, birdlike, her eyes filled with a bright in- 
terrogation as she talked on her fingers; nothing could be 
more expressive of a lovely intelligence. 

Her devotion was to a country, to a cause, and through 

[235] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

them to those noble and heroic ones who had served or were 
serving the country and the cause well. The devotion she 
had had for Kickham she carried on to the O'Learys. She 
had a great and well-deserved affection for Dr. Sigerson, 
who devoted himself to guarding the flame of her life, and 
tiding it on past the, fatal twenties and early thirties, beyond 
which the one threatened with consumption may live and 
grow strong. She came and went in his house at Clare 
Street, as I did after a time, like his own daughters. He 
was always watching over her and taking care of her. 

All sorts of people used to come to that warm room in 
Middle Abbey Street. Douglas Hyde, still in his rooms in 
T. C. D., used to come there. So did W. B. Yeats. So did 
Mr. Stephen Gwynn, newly from Oxford, unbearded, 
young. Once there was a deeply-bearded, handsome Irish- 
American, with a cordial hand-clasp and a friendly eye, 
Denis Downing Mulcahy, ex-Fenian. Of course Ellen 
O'Leary and John O'Leary were often to be found there; 
and the Sigersons and myself. In time a few other young 
T. C. D. men. One, who was an Englishman and a 
Protestant, Rose distinctly liked. I have been talking about 
her impersonal devotion to heroic people. She was anti- 
English. I am sure it was not a pose; she was too sincere 
and honest for that. She had said to me that a difference 
of religion would not stand in the way of her marrying 
a man she liked; but she would not marry an Englishman. 
Her ideal husband, she used to say, would be a rich Ameri- 
can who would take her to Italy and keep her in the sun 
and away from the winter and east winds. I don't think 
she ever got more than half-way towards being in love. 
Her devotions satisfied her. She used to be tender in a 
laughing way over our love troubles. She never had any 
of her own. Perhaps, being of the Predestined, she felt 

[236] 



CHIEFLY ROSE KAVANAGH 

she had no time. Still, she might have been in love w^ith 
the young Protestant Englishman, who had something 
pathetic about his lined forehead and the v^istful lift of his 
eyebrows. He touched her more than anyone else. 

Perhaps she held a little aloof — in the spirit — from us 
who were to be wives and mothers of children and house- 
mistresses, and carry the cares of life and its joys and 
gather our sheaves. Of course she was always held some- 
what in check by the cold touch which reminded her that 
however bonnie her looks she had a mortal delicacy. One 
could never be sure of her for an expedition or an ad- 
venture. Cold and draughts had always to be guarded 
against. She was often in bed. But when she was well 
for a time she was as gay as a bird. 

There was a day when we had tea with Douglas Hyde 
in Trinity College. Perhaps Craobhin Aobhin (pronounced 
Creeveen Eeveen — i.e. the dear little nut-branch) was at 
his least inspiring within the walls of his Alma Mater, 
which was no more motherly to the future lighter of the 
Gaelic torch in Ireland than she had been to any other of 
her great sons. I recall the event without any glow of 
pleasure. It seems to have been a somewhat conventional 
entertainment, which was not often the case with any- 
thing in which Douglas Hyde took a hand. 

His was a many-sided and fascinating personality. I re- 
member the surprise with which John O'Leary, who knew 
only his serious side, announced one day that "Hyde was a 
flirt." He had a wide scholarship beyond his knowledge 
of the Gaelic. He was a student and burned the midnight 
oil, but at his own home in the West of Ireland he would 
be off to a fair at four o'clock in the morning to sell or 
buy cattle or sheep. He was a thorough sportsman, and his 
birds and fish used to come to us in Dublin when he was 

[237] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

away in the west. After tramping a bog all day after snipe 
and curlew he would sit down by a cabin fire, draw a small 
bottle of poteen from his pocket, light his pipe, and hand 
his pouch across to the tight-mouthed man of the house, 
and wait till confidence came and the seal on the lips was 
broken. He gathered songs, stories, traditions, which were 
fast passing into the limbo of lost things — we lose things in 
Ireland more than elsewhere, I think — as no one else could 
have gathered them. He was a man and a brother when 
he sat by those cabin fires. Only a man and a brother could 
have waited in patience till the peasant let fall the precious 
things for him to gather up. 

Douglas Hyde had always a very suave and compli- 
mentary tongue where he did not desire to offend. Years 
later I remember a description by a very acute observer 
of Hyde presiding over a Gaelic League Convention, where 
things were in dispute and had to be fought out. I forget 
the exact occasion. The Convention wanted its own way, 
which was not Hyde's. The sitting lasted all day, and 
Hyde had no time for a meal — no sustenance but the 
tumbler of whisky and soda on the chimneypiece from 
which he drank now and again. 

"Hyde's strength lies in a pretended weakness," said the 
acute observer. "He seemed to be going with them all the 
time, to be in cordial agreement when they were most un- 
reasonable. His courtesy was extraordinary. Sometime 
in the small hours, when everyone else was worn out, Hyde 
suddenly carried the day." After saying so much I apolo- 
gise for speaking of Dr. Hyde in the past tense. Happily 
he is still with us. 

Another expedition on which Rose and I went together 
was to a house which dabbled much in spiritualism, where 
the hostess was nervy because of faces always floating about 

[ 238 ] 



CHIEFLY ROSE KAVANAGH 

her by night and day, and the host, a Httle fair-haired 
gentle-looking man with spectacles, had an invincible cour- 
age and determination to see things through. 

I think Rose must have gone away after tea, for I do not 
remember her in the later developments. The later develop- 
ments took the form of a spiritualistic seance in which I par- 
ticipated most unwillingly. Willie Yeats was also of the 
party. The remaining ones were undistinguished, if occult. 

In spite of my protestations my host gently but firmly 
made me take a part. We sat round a table in the darkness 
touching each other's hands. I was quite determined to be 
in opposition to the whole thing, to disbelieve in it, and 
disapprove of it as a playing with things of life and death. 
Presently the table stood up slowly: the host was psychic. 
There were presences. The presences had communications 
to make and struggled to make them. Willie Yeats was 
banging his head on the table as though he had a fit, mut- 
tering to himself. I had a cold repulsion to the whole busi- 
ness. I took my hands from the table. Presently the spirits 
were able to speak. There was someone in the room who 
was hindering them. By this time I had got in a few invo- 
cations of my own. There was a tremendous deal of rap- 
ping going on. The spirits were obviously annoyed. They 
were asked for an indication as to who it was that was hold- 
ing them back. They indicated me, and I was asked to 
withdraw, which I did cheerfully. The last thing I saw as 
the door opened to let me pass through was Willie Yeats 
banging his head on the table. 

He explained to me afterwards that the spirits were evil. 
To keep them off he had been saying the nearest approach 
to a prayer he could remember, which was the opening lines 
of Paradise Lost: 

"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit." 
[ 239 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I wonder if this occasion marked Willie Yeats's first in- 
duction into the occult matters with which afterwards he 
became so fascinated. The O'Learys, Ellen especially, were 
very much disturbed at the report of the proceedings, and 
anxious lest Willie Yeats should embark upon table-turning, 
spirit-rapping, and all the rest of the "foul brood of folly," 
to make another Miltonic quotation. However, I do not 
think he repeated his experience at that time. I am quite 
sure it jarred his nerves and senses. It was later on that 
he veered steadily towards magic, from which, however, he 
has long since got away since Lady Gregory's friendship 
began to throw its protecting influence over him. But of 
that more in its proper place. 

During that year also my friendship with Dr. and Mrs. 
Atkinson, with Father Russell and Rosa Mulholland, sweet- 
ened and enriched my life. I also saw a great deal of the 
two Sigerson girls. In the summer of that year I went on 
a visit to the Piatts at Queenstown, and was the means of 
introducing Hester, the younger girl, to Donn Piatt, whom 
she afterwards married, as I was the means of introducing 
Dora some years later to Mr. Clement Shorter, whom she 
married. 

We were all possessed with the common impulse towards 
literature. We were all making our poems and stories. 
Dora Sigerson, who was then a strikingly handsome girl, 
was painting as well, making statuettes and busts, doing all 
sorts of things, and looking like a young Muse. Dr. Siger- 
son was, as he is happily doing to-day, dispensing the most 
delightful hospitality. His Sunday night dinners were, and 
are, a feature of literary life in Dublin, chiefly of the literary 
life which has the colour of the green. At the time there 
was no Irish Literary Society, as there is now, with Dr. 
Sigerson for its President. The best of the young intellect 

[240] 



CHIEFLY ROSE KAVANAGH 

of Dublin was to be found at Dr. Sigerson's board. Nowa- 
days there is not so much poetry talked there as there 
used to be in the old days. The personnel of the guests has 
somewhat changed. Nowadays one finds more an academic 
atmosphere, with the Fellows and Professors of the new 
National University. We miss many a one. But happily 
there is still the most gracious and genial of hosts, who 
seems to grow but the kinder and warmer as the years pass. 
Dr. Sigerson, with his fine picturesque head, has all the 
gracious and stately virtues of the remembered days in an 
age that is shifting and changing and breaking up. Poet, 
scholar, historian, patriot, virtuoso, physician, but above 
all friend, the most generous and constant of friends, Dr. 
Sigerson is known to the circle that loves him. 



[241] 



CHAPTER XX 

FRANCES WYNNE 

Another friend of 1887 was Frances Wynne, the young 
poet who died in 1893, the year after her marriage, leaving 
behind her an infant son and one slender but exquisite vol- 
ume of poems, Whisper. 

Her father, Mr. Alfred Wynne, was land-agent to Lord 
Massareene, and to various other Irish landlords. One of 
his agencies was for the Burnaby estate, which belonged 
to the widow of Fred Burnaby of the Ride to Khiva, an 
Irish heiress, who is now well known as Mrs. Aubrey le 
Blond. Cheeverstown, my father's best beloved farm, be- 
longed to this lady, and he had always paid his rent to 
Mr. Wynne, without ever' coming into personal touch with 
him. My father was the least troublesome of tenants. He 
had always paid his rent, and asked for no concessions. In- 
deed, I believe that although he was not at all an anti- 
landlord man, he yet held in his secret heart that all agents 
were ill-disposed towards all tenants. Hence his accept- 
ance of the fact that in the many years of their business re- 
lation he and Mr. Wynne- had never laid eyes on each 
other. 

I cannot remember now what the occasion was of Mr. 
Wynne's paying us a visit after those years. He came, 
and our expectations of him were happily disappointed. 
Some copies of Louise de la Valliere had just arrived, and 
I gave him one. He was much delighted by the literary 
aspect of my little room, and the interview left us all real 
friends. He had a gracious and most charming personality. 

A little later he came again with his daughter, who had 

[ 242 ] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

certainly manoeuvred the second visit — a slender, brown- 
haired, brown-faced girl, with an eager, vivacious expres- 
sion, an animated and appealing manner, altogether a warm 
and glowing creature. Like other dear friends of my early 
days, Frances Wynne was of the Predestined. It revealed 
itself, if we had only understood, in her extraordinary eager- 
ness towards life, as though having so little a time to stay 
she must seize the cup with both hands and drink fast. 

At the moment her impulse was towards literature. She 
had been brought up in a gentle, religious, refined, un- 
eventful atmosphere — perhaps better fitted to those who 
have experienced life than to those eager to taste it. Will 
the mature and the old ever realise the thirst of the young 
for life and how little their own enclosed garden satisfies 
that perfectly lawful appetite? Frances Wynne had the 
energy to lay hold on life and drink a deep draught of it 
before she laid down the cup for ever in her twenty-eighth 
year. 

Nothing could be sweeter, gentler, more high-minded 
than the atmosphere in which she grew up in the old- 
fashioned, ample house in Collon, Co. Louth, with its old 
garden and many beauties. But it was very claustral, and 
Frances Wynne, with her mignonne face, was all for human 
beings and a world of adventure. Thousands of daughters 
of the Protestant gentle-folk of the English and Irish coun- 
try lead just such sheltered and love-kept lives, and are, or 
appear, content when they do not become suffragettes, or 
lady-cooks, or hospital nurses. It is not easy for the 
parents who have done everything, would do everything, 
for their children to realise the passionate clamour in the 
children's hearts to do something for themselves. 

I think Frances Wynne's desire for adventure must have 
come from her father. This friend, whom we had never 

[243] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

thought of as a friend before, proved to be a real gain. He 
was a cheerful, bustling, kindly gentleman, who, while he 
transacted his worldly business, and a great deal of it, as 
well as another, yet had an ever-present sense of a world 
out of mortal sight. I used to think that he did all his 
everyday actions with an eye to how God would see them. 
In all the relations of life he was excellent. There was 
something of the Quixote in him, for he parted with Lord 
Massareene before the grave troubles broke out on the es- 
tate, his recommendations as to an abatement and read- 
justing of the rents having been disregarded. He was in 
the fullest sense of the word a just man. Belonging to the 
Evangelical Irish Protestantism which, except as regards 
its servants, has lived in an almost inhuman aloofness from 
its Catholic neighbours, he had neither timidity nor cold- 
ness towards his nor aught but charity. 

Alfred Wynne was the kind of man to take literally the 
injunction as to loving one's neighbour as oneself. In 
that very Protestant household — and it was not at all an 
isolated case — the Catholic servants were really and truly 
members of the family. There were two sisters, cook and 
parlour-maid, who were the dear friends and lifelong 
servants of the family. They often come into Frances 
Wynne's letters to me, of which I have discovered a bundle. 
In those humble friends their beloved "Miss Francie" found 
no flaw, as she was perfect in theirs. Another old servant 
of her grandmother was also a close and dear friend. She 
had given "Miss Francie" her watch and many other gifts, 
splendidly generous, as it comes easy to the Irish Celt to 
be, and when Frances Wynne was about to be married she 
found pinned to her bedroom pin-cushion an envelope con- 
taining a five-pound note, "For my darling Miss Francie 
from Mary Anne." 

[244] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

In addition to his goodness, Mr. Wynne had a merri- 
ment, a roguishness, which explained his daughter's quali- 
ties. He had that abundant sense of humour without which 
business dealings with the Irish, indeed any dealings with 
them, would be a constant vexation of the spirit. There 
was a good deal of the boy in Frances. She could no more 
content herself than a spirited boy in an atmosphere of high 
thinking, gentle pleasures, and hidden good works. 

She grasped at everything that meant a fuller life. I was 
an objective in that way. She found me in an atmosphere 
of books and papers. There was even a proof or two on 
the table — perhaps I put them there on purpose to be seen. 
I was yet young enough to be proud of them, and she was 
thrilled and envious. 

Unlike most of my correspondents of that time she dates 
her letters; perhaps she inherited something of a business 
faculty from her father; and from her letters, the first be- 
ginning "My dear Miss Tynan," I gather that that first 
visit was paid in April. Hers was an apparition well in 
keeping with the sweet April ; and I think there were prim- 
roses and pale primulas and a bowl of wallflowers in my 
room that day. Her first letter was written immediately 
after her return home, on the 8th of April, 1887. She 
plunged into friendship and confidences at once. Her let- 
ters were literary from the beginning, in that they give 
glimpses of her daily life, wonderfully fresh and vivid 
to-day, though the grasses have been growing over all that 
was mortal of her sweetness for twenty years. 

"I went a long drive with Papa to-day to a house with a 
story. It was once a beautiful place, but now the house is 
deserted and the rooms are damp: the wall-paper is hang- 
ing ofif, and the floors are full of holes. A dirty, drunken- 
looking man 'caretakes' in the dining-room, and the dogs 

[245] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

sleep in the library. As for the garden, it was too heart- 
rending. Only the sweet-briar is coming unconcernedly 
into leaf as though nothing had happened." 

May 1st, Sunday. 

I do wish I was going to see you. But Papa says he'll 
take me another time. I have lets to say to you, and I'm 
sitting in my little window (our house is very old, and the 
windows are deep-set and square) all ready to begin, but, 
alas ! it is tea-time and I must go down. However, the 
family will be all turning churchward in about half an 
hour, and I having had two Sunday schools and one church 
already am going to stay at home and then I shall write 
my letter. 

5.45. — Papa and Mother have just disappeared through 
the church-door, which is about a stone's throw from our 
house, Dear darling Papa and Mother, they are so good 
to me! 

Sunday Evening, May 29, 1887. 
My dear, my Poet [mark the advance!], — I've got 
ready to write to you. Put on my dear old velveteen dress 
which I wear of evenings, seen the family depart to church 
and — but there's been a great "Demonstration" in quiet 
little Collon to-day, and remnants of it are straying still in 
front of my open window. The last and most out-of-tune 
of the bands has just been murdering "The Wearing of 
the Green" in front of the priest's house next-door. And 
bless me if it's not coming back again ! — no, it's a good one, 
playing "Let Erin remember!" Oh dear, I wish Erin 
could! You see it's rather hard to write with all this fuss. 
Collon is such a well-behaved little place. They are always 
so good and quiet — considering — the people are. It is a 

[246] 




Dr. George Sigerson 




Charles J. Kickham 



FRANCES WYNNE 

shame that . . . should have brought all this Plan of 
Campaign and discontent into the village. . . . There 
w^ould have been no trouble all the winter, and there would 
be peace now, and I could write to you collectedly. It makes 
me so nervish, cars rushing by, and snatches of conversa- 
tion going on. And oh, I do want to thank you with my 
best and warmest love for your dear letter. You can't 
think what worlds of good it did me. I was putting on 
my gloves and pulling out my bonnet-strings on the 
drawing-room rug to-day, before going to Sunday school, 
and Mother said: "Darling, you're looking much better, 
and somehow you look good-er to-day. I don't know what 
it is." And I said: "Well, it's dreadful to have a face 
that tells everything, but if you want to know what it is, 
it is just Miss Tynan's letter." If only that dreadful Break 
(now is it Brake or Break?) would leave off, I could get 
on. Do you ever feel like a very old horse-hair sofa, when 
the ends of the hair are sticking out? That is how I feel 
now. And if I go down to the drawing-room it won't be 
writing to you, and I'll miss the sunshine dying off the tops 
of the beech-trees and the purple coming into the grey 
of the church-wall. Dear darling, it was so good of you 
to write to me as you did. It was just what I wanted safd 
to me. After I had read your letter it was "clear shining 
after rain." I always think that such a sweet little bit of 
poetry. I remember once when I was at school in London 
we were having a dreadfully dry lesson on the kings of 
Judah and Israel (be glad you don't have such things), and 
it came to my turn to read. I hadn't been listening much, 
and the governess said sharply, "Frances, the 4th verse" ; 
and I read with a sort of thrill : "He shall be as the light 
of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning with- 
out clouds, as the tender grass springing out of the earth 

[247] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

by clear shining after rain." That was the best lesson I 
ever got about the kings of Israel. ... It was so good 
of you to be so kind about my little poem, and to speak 
so earnestly to me about writing. I love trying to write, 
but I feel so diffident about my attempts. Do you know 
I think I am a wee little bit like you, in the way of think- 
ing the same sort of things at all events. I often wish so 
much to have you see a thing that comes home to me, for 
I know it would to you too. The other day I was in 
Drogheda lunching with Miss Keogh, the daughter of our 
Stipendiary Magistrate. She lives next to St. Mary's Con- 
vent. She took me up to their garden, terrace after terrace 
enclosed by high beech hedges, to the top of the hill. 
(They're coming out of church. How horrid!) The last 
little plot was enclosed by very high beech walls, and there 
was only a square of long grass with little black crosses in 
it. It was dark there. And Miss Keogh said : "This is 
the nun's burial-ground. Our man keeps it in order for 
them. Indeed the grass wants cutting badly." There was 
an iron gate at the side through which blazed two long 
strips of bright colour from the old-fashioned borders in 
the convent garden. We went in, for the nuns allow Miss 
Keogh to walk in their garden, and I thought of many 
things, of how hard I'd find it to become a nun, and of 
how good they must be, just visiting the poor and teach- 
ing the children, and meditating among the bright flowers. 
And then opening the iron gate and passing in among 
the graves at last. I looked at the Dominican Convent at 
the other side of the river, behind two great sycamore trees, 
and I thought of you. Miss Keogh played beautifully for 
me on her organ. ... I must tell you one more thing 
before I go down to play hymns for the children. I'm 
afraid it must wait till I come up to bed, for I see it's a 

[248] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

quarter to eight. And at eight delicate Effie and little May- 
go up to bed, and Edie and I and Papa and Mother go 
to tea. I must go . . . I've peeped into the drawing- 
room — May is saying her Collect to Mother, and then she 
has a hymn to say, so I've come back. You must know 
we have a laundress, and her name is Biddy. She's small 
and quiet, with a pair of soft brown eyes that look up slowly 
at one, and contrast with her grey hair. Poor Biddy is 
not very strong in the intellect, and Kate (my Kate, you 
know) is very good to her. Yesterday I was writing here, 
and Mary brought my things up from the wash. I said, 
"Oh, Mary, that wretched Biddy has torn the lace off my 
new bodice." Mary said, "Miss Francie, was Kate tellin' 
you about poor Biddy's fast?" I said no. So she told me 
this story. It seems poor Biddy thought she escaped some 
dreadful danger this time last year. On Tuesday she didn't 
come to her dinner, and Kate sent the kitchen-maid, Mary 
Barron, to call her. "No, thank you, Mary," she said, "I 
don't want any dinner. I'm fastin'." Tea-time came, and 
Biddy, who loves her tea, never came. She went away at 
six. The next day again she did not come to her dinner. 
Kate went and tried to persuade her, but she looked up 
out of her great brown eyes more pitiful than ever, and 
she said, "No, thank you, my fast's not over yet, and 
nothing you could offer me would make me break it." "She 
bought a couple of pennyworth of sweets in Gargan's shop," 
said Mary, "and she sucked one now and again when she 
felt the faintness comin' over her. . . . Will I put your 
bodice where you won't forget it. Miss Francie, love?" I 
was wondering if God didn't think better of Biddy's self- 
denial, although she is simple, than of much almsgiving 
and oblation. 

10.30 P.M. — We've been laughing and having a good 

[249] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

time, and every now and again Papa would frown in his 
tragic way, and say he'd been having a very ungodly Sun- 
day. He is delicious when he's tragic. You don't know 
him well enough to know that. To-night they let me talk 
and make them laugh. ... I think it better for Papa 
to be made laugh after his long and busy week, and his 
Sunday spent in good works than to have reading of good 
books on Sunday night. I've been reading Marcella Grace. 
I think it's a sweet book, a little ideal, but that's no harrum! 
Thank you so much for sending me those letters. I've 
taken a fancy to your friend, Maurice Ranking. I think 
very few men preserve such freshness as his in this old 
world. I was saying to Ada last night in a letter that God 
didn't forget me when He sent me you. Ada says she is 
imploring her aunt to get Lottise de la Valliere. She saw 
Robert Browning the other day at the Grosvenor Gallery. 
She writes: "Oh, darling, what do you think? I have 
seen our own dear R.B. in the flesh." You must know 
that Ada and I having read Selected Poems, portions of 
the Ring and the Book, Pippa Passes, and the Soul's 
Tragedy, have appropriated Browning, and speak familiarly 
of him as R.B. . . . Edie and I were in Dublin on 
Friday. She had a music-lesson, and afterwards I took 
her to Christ Church, as she'd never been in a cathedral. 
Fancy, there were only eleven people there for a congrega- 
tion ! Lovely music. Service sweet, and lasted only half 
an hour. The notion of the Protestants of Dublin having 
two cathedrals, and not knowing any better than to desert 
the services ! They ought to hand over St. Patrick's. . . . 
It was so kind of you to let me see what Father Russell said 
of me. . . . Yes, I have the Imitation. It's the only 
religious book of its kind I care for. Only it has no kind. 
"Of the King's Highway of the Holy Cross" ; "Of Four 

[250] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

Things which bring much Inward Peace," and the Holy 
Communion chapters are what I like best. ... I hope 
you won't hate the enclosed, for I liked making it up. It 
was such a delicious night when I thought the things I said 
in it. But it would come in that metre. Don't you think 
that your father (who strikes me as being clever enough" 
for anything) could find something imperatively needing 
Papa's presence at Whitehall. I hope God will keep pour- 
ing more and more poetry into me, for indeed I do love it. 
It's a quarter past twelve, so, good-night." 

She has been to Scotland, and has returned on June 19th, 
the date of her next letter. She was very glad to be back. 

"Isn't it nice that I'm home again ? It was so long over 
there in the lonely hotel. They were all so glad to have me 
back, and I was so glad to come. Mother said she had 
missed me dreadfully with my rush and noise about the 
house, and Kate was actually tearful. I am repaid. My 
six weeks in London in the spring seemed comparatively 
short alongside of this last. I loved travelling in third- 
class carriages and on top of 'buses and all the human 
interests, but it was so external. Do you think "Jessie" 
very bad? She was a little four-year-old girl I made friends 
with one day at the railway-station, and that Sunday after 
I wrote to you, as I was coming back from the Holy Com- 
munion, I saw little Jessie walking along between her 
mother and uncle. She ran to me, and I caught her into 
my arms with all the blood of my body rushing into my 
face, and those wretched, uncontrollable tears flooding my 
eyes. She was the only friend I had in Edinburgh, and 
I felt so sad when her lovely little face went out of my 
life for ever. . . . 

"I didn't tell you I went to St. Giles' Cathedral on Sun- 

[251] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

day with Papa. I thought I should never get out. Such a 
dull, colourless service, nearly two hours long; and no 
brightness or beauty, though the old church is in itself 
grand enough. I was so delighted when I came across that 
bit in Matthew Arnold last night, where he says in The 
Need for Beauty: 'Puritanism can never satisfy it. The 
Catholic Church and the English Church can.' . . . 
Nothing can deprive us of the Prayer-Book. The Scotch 
make it up as they go along, so if they are not in a good 
frame of mind it is a bad joy. Most Irish churches are 
so ugly that it is a good thing they are kept under lock 
and key, but it's an odious practice. In England and in 
your Church the having the churches so accessible gives 
the people a sort of feeling that they've a right to the place, 
which is good. I wish they'd arrange the altar flowers less 
prosaically than they do in most churches. Needless to 
remark that in Ireland Catholics have the monopoly of 
flowers and any attempt at beauty. It would be dreadful 
to have flowers in our churches. Himmel ! I think it's so 
good for people who never see anything pretty in their 
dreary lives to have something better to look at in their 
churches. Mary brimmed over with righteous indignation 
one day about 'how different the chapel was kep' in her 
place to what it was here,' and how she'd 'like to get at 
this chapel an' settle it as it ought to be.' In which I fully 
concurred. I love arranging flowers — do you? Once our 
church here was 'decorated' at Christmas, and most of the 
congregation stayed away. Defend me from a respectable 
Irish Protestant of the tradesman class! Talk of Philis- 
tinism! I adore beauty and colour, and life and bright- 
ness. It's giving me pure pleasure at this moment to see 
the colour of a vivid orange nasturtium against the dark 
brown of the hanging basket it is in. There are the children 

[252] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

coming out of church — May in her white frock, with her 
yellow hair, more like a daisy than ever." 

I have given this passage to show how the strong young 
soul was cleaving a way for itself, and I heartily hope it will 
cause no lightest distress to anyone. 

The letter proceeds : "I did enjoy coming down the 
Clyde on our way home. We were a long time on the 
steamer before she started, and it was bliss. It had been 
wet and dreary, and my heart had been sobbing all through 
the streets of Glasgow. But the evening cleared; and the 
great wide river with the ships gliding past; and the sun 
setting in red and golden light ; and the great band of shim- 
mering, slowly fading rosy reflection on the water; and 
the blue hills getting far away and mysterious as the twi- 
light came and the lights glimmered out one by one as we 
floated slowly down the river! Oh dear, it was all lovely! 
. . . About Rossetti — what bliss if we could read him to- 
gether! If you could get me from Inchicore I could often 
come and spend a day with you, if you would only have me. 
It's too much to ask. And I'm so ignorant. I've never read 
any Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth or Milton (I never 
could read Milton) or Byron. I've really read only Tenny- 
son and E. B. Browning, and a little of R. B. and a few 
scattered poems, and some Shakespeare. I'm always read- 
ing, and I've read nothing." 

The next two or three letters are written in pencil, less 
decipherable after the passage of twenty-five years. The 
first, barely begun on the Sunday evening — she had to go 
to church — is continued, "Mon. Morning, in the drawing- 
room." 

■ "I want you so much. I'm heavy and tired with the 
tiredness of a coming sore throat. Oh dear, what a good 
time I had with you last week ! . . . Last night I didn't 

[253] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

like having to go to church. I Hke saying my prayers. I'm 
so fond of the Book of Common Prayer. I like praying, 
'Give unto Thy servants that peace which the world can- 
not give.' And I like 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech 
Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from 
all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of Thine 
only Son.' But, O Katie darling, the sermon ! Do you 
know what I did? I stared out of my corner at the long 
rows of lamps stretching down the aisle till they sort of got 
run into each other and I lost the sense of the sermon, 
and only heard a long monotonous buzzing. And then I 
made myself imagine that there was a great broad river 
running between the pews where the aisle is ; and I said to 
myself that if I stood up I'd see the lights reflected in it. 
And I thought of the evening you and I sat on the pier at 
Kingstown, and how sweet it was, when suddenly Mr. 

F gave a very loud roar, and all at once the lamps got 

very distinct, and the pews got into pews, and though I 
couldn't see the aisle, I knew it had cocoanut matting on 
it. . . . 

"Dear Father Russell sent me the /. M., with a 'Cycle 
of Sonnets' by Monty Griffin. Strange that though I un- 
derstand all the sonnets I should prefer that 'Sycamore 
Wood' of the incomprehensible Yeats. I have Louise de 
la Valliere on my lap, with the second volume of the Ring 
and the Book, Louise because she looked so lonely lying 
far away on a table by the window, and being part of you, 
I couldn't bear that. ..." 

Another pencilled letter on the following Sunday, when 
she is kept in bed because of a cold. 

"There is a wind springing up. It sounds so nice out 
there in the faint, grey night. I hear the sycamore trees at 
the churchyard wall, and the old elm-tree across the road, 

[254] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

and the poplar in the opposite garden being- rocked to and 
fro. I can hear the poplar quite distinctly rustling its leaves. 
The corncrake isn't croaking himself to sleep to-night. I 
hope it won't rain till Effie gets safe to the sea." 

[Effie was a darling invalid sister who was the light of the 
house.] 

"And then I'd like it to come down in soft caressing 
drops and to keep on for a long time sinking steadily into 
the ground, with your west wind ruffling my hair when I 
leant out of the window to watch the rain. I think soft 
summer rain is so beautiful. It always has a sort of Irish 
feeling about it. This golden weather has been delightful; 
it will make the rain sweeter when it comes. I hate rough, 
boisterous, windy wet days. . . . It's so sweet, all that 
poem of yours about the hills and the river. You must 
have loved to make it, something like flying. One thing 
that thrills me is about 'the old beloved things.' It's so 
human, your Heaven. There's a bit in Isaiah : 'And there 
the glorious Lord shall be unto us as a place of broad rivers 
and streams.' There's a marvellous amount of poetry in 
the Bible. Mother says I shouldn't read it for the sake of the 
poetry. But sure I do read everything from a poetry stand- 
point. I'd like to know what comes up to 'For the winter 
is past : the rain is over and gone.' " 

Frances Wynne's long letters continued steadily through 
1887. I believe she wrote every Sunday during that year. 
I can find no letters of a later year; and if they were not 
lost, I must only conclude that as she was steadily emanci- 
pating herself, and as she ran on her progress to poetry, 
she must have been happier and busier, with less need to 
write these long outpourings. The letters strike me as being 
such a charming revelation of character, and presenting her 
surroundings so vividly, that I do not ask pardon for going 
on with my extracts from them in another chapter. 

[ 255 ] 



CHAPTER XXI 

FRANCES WYNNE (continued) 

There is a jump to the next letter of my budget, which is 
dated August 28, 1887. 

"My own Dear, — I do wish you had been in our 
drawing-room just a minute ago to stand up for me. I 
was mercilessly sat upon about reading so much (which 
I don't), and neglecting my accomplishments and the culti- 
vation of my mind. Oh, such rain as we've been having 
to-day ! Such tremendous showers ; Papa is delighted, and 
stands by the staircase window gazing with pensive rapture 
into the steadily-filling tank. . . . Here the door has 
opened, and — enter Grannie! Down she sat, the dear, 
pretty old sweet, and has spent the last twenty minutes giv- 
ing me a lecture on how I ought to make a list of my hours, 
&c., &c. But, bless me, it's impossible. If I made a list 
I'd never be easy till I broke it, and I can't be anyone but 
myself, just as I am, for all anyone can say. I must go 
and sing to Mrs. Peppar now, and I'll chatter to you more 
when I come back. I have to sing : 

" 'I'm but a stranger here, 

'Heaven is my home ; 
Earth is a desert drear, 

Heaven is my home ; 
Danger and sorrow stand 
Round me on every hand ; 
Heaven is my fatherland, 

Heaven is my home.' 

It's gall and wormwood to me. Earth isn't a desert drear, 
and I don't know what heaven is like. And Ireland's my 
fatherland." 

[256] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

"Twelve o'clock midnight. — I had to wait till a great 
shower was over to go to Mrs. Peppar. On my way from 
her I found Kate and the kitchen-maid milking. So I had 
to hear the history of how little milk the white cow's 
daughter gives as compared with her mother, and how the 
calves couldn't be weaned because there was no grass, &c., 
&c. And so, darling, I couldn't come back to you after 
all. . . . Do you know I never read Maud till I was 
fifteen? Papa read it aloud then. Mother and all were 
there, so I couldn't say, 'Stop, it's too much.' But, good- 
ness ! When I came up to bed ! How I cried ! But it was 
a nice sort of crying. It was hard to explain to Mother 
when she came up, having heard sobs above her head in 
the stillness of the night. And Christmas night Papa tried 
to read out Enoch Arden to me, and we both came to grief 
hopelessly. You should have seen Mother's face when she 
opened the study door and found her aged husband and 
young daughter weeping together! Maud doesn't affect 
Papa a bit ; but he never got through reading Enoch Arden 
aloud in his life. He hardly ever reads poetry aloud now. 
Mother likes to talk about the tenants and their woes. Dear 
darling, she's so human and good to everyone that's poor 
or in trouble. It was, oh, so hot in church to-day. I 
thought the sermon was never, never going to end. And 
I had put in an hour and a quarter of Sunday School previ- 
ously. Oh dear, I was so tired ! I enclose the result of 
my meditations during the rector's lengthened discourse. 
There was a darling sunbeam in church, and I imagined 
I was ten. The poem couldn't be worse, I fear, if I was." 

The letter goes on : "We have such an idyllic wall in 
our garden. In another fortnight the jessamine will be out. 
Kindly imagine It is July when you are reading the poem, 
and me a small girl in a high pew." 

[257] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Here follow arrangements about a meeting. 

"I suppose the Inchicore tram starts often from College 
Green. Life is long, and with patience and hope we may 
contrive to meet. (I stopped here and read Bishop Bloti- 
gram's Apology.) Isn't it weird? Rather uncomfortable. 
I'm going to invest in a lot of Canterbury Poets when I 
go to town. Is Keats published in that series? I have 
wanted to read Burns so much since I went to Scotland, 
but Ada's father took the book away from her, so I sup- 
pose I mustn't. No one ever notices or knows what I read. 
I might read anything. It was so sweet of you to say 
"Jessie" looked delightful. I am that much of a Celt that 
anything in the way of beliefishness runs warmly through 
my blood. I do adore that sonnet of Mr. Yeats's. Aunt 
Sophy, however, scoffed at me for saying so. I suppose 
some people have a keener feeling for poetry than others, 
and I have a feelish perception of poetry. You will under- 
stand, having it so much stronger yourself, and won't think 
me conceited. You know what it means — the intense pas- 
sion for poetry and the rapture of it. But you can express 
it, which must be bliss of the most advanced type, I was 
out late in the evening a few days ago, and it was so dreary. 
There was a livid sunset, and all the rest was clouds. A 
heron got up and throbbed along the little river, his wings 
shining almost blue in the slanting western light. Then 
I saw him no more. One of these autumnal evenings we've 
been having I thought of a great garden I know, and 
how it would soon be dug up and left empty, with only 
the marigolds in it. So I wrote the enclosed. I'm sure 
you'll think it very bad, my dear, and you may be as 
hard on me as you like. It is very unfinished and uncon- 
nected I know, but that is how I felt it, and despairing, 
too. It's odd that I've discovered since that marigolds mean 

[ 258 ] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

despair. I was so thankful to have it to think about after 
the loneliness of the last fortnight. Do you know, they 
are just in from church. And here's all I have written! 
And it's only 7.15, and I have to have a candle. ... I 
should so love to meet Miss Mulholland. It zvould be good 
of you to let me. If Miss Kavanagh liked me half as well 
as I liked her, I am satisfied with the impression I made. 
I am so glad you are not thinking of going to England. 
But I know how it will be. They will over-persuade you, 
and you will go. I feel it borne in upon me. And then what 
shall I do? . . . 

"Mon. Morn. — O dear, such a day! Rain streaming 
down ceaselessly. Poor Papa has had to go to a function 
at Dundalk, something about Land Purchase, and has to 
drive miles on a car in the rain. My dear little god-child 
died last evening. The lovely little baby! I feel so much 
for her poor mother, who has lost another little girl within 
the last two months. The baby was her little comfort, and 
she is distracting herself with reproach for always having 
had her in the room in which poor Daisy was dying of con- 
sumption. If you knew the angelic kindness of Papa on 
Saturday when the little baby was to be buried. The father, 
who had been away, came home very unsteady, and it was 
all Papa could do to keep him decently quiet. The little 
coffin was brought in our carriage to the church. And 
there were no flowers in this senseless weather for me to 
send. Poor little baby, she suffered in the five months of 
her life on earth ; but I think God will make it up to her. 
I was just making some pinafores for her. She had on the 
little frock I made for her the day before she died. I didn't 
know she was so near Heaven, poor sweet. She was not 
long reaching the fulfilment of the baptismal prayer that 
she might 'so pass the waves of this troublesome world 

[259] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

as finally to come to the land of everlasting life.' 'This 
troublesome world/ as the dear old poetry-prayer has it, 
is very troublesome just now. . . . 

"I wonder if Father Russell would spare me two or three 
more copies of the Irish Monthly. I'd just love to see Miss 
Mulholland's poem. It is cold and damp — isn't It? I wish 
you and I were sitting over some delicious fire together. 
I wish I were sitting on the floor with my head on your 
knee. ..." 

Here the letter breaks off abruptly. A sheet of it must 
have been lost. Indeed, it is being borne in upon me that 
I have only odd letters left, and since the writer occasion- 
ally forgets to date I fear I am jumping from one season 
to another. The next letter of my batch is dated Aug. 31st, 
and calls itself a P.S. letter, plainly an addition to some- 
thing that went before. 

"Our visitors have just gone, and there is the consequent 
lull. I wish you were up here talking to me. I wish you 
were reading Rossetti to me. Poor Goodymamma has been 
very ill indeed ; everyone is ill and unhappy, and I am lone- 
some. This time last year I hadn't you. And you know 
you are a very good joy. It seems a very long time since 
I heard from you. I wonder how 'November Eve' is get- 
ting on! And the article for Oscar Wilde. I don't very 
often do any needlework, but when I do I'm reminded of 
you. I have a sweet little workbasket that I lined myself, 
about four inches long. And stuck inside the lid there is 
a pin with a green head. And the day Ada and I were 
at Whitehall you pinned the lily you were wearing into my 
frock with that pin which matched your frock. Every time 
I open the workbasket, not thinking of anything, there 
flashes upon me that good joy day we had with you, when 
we were so happy malgre the wet. Darling, there is such a 

[ 260 ] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

wind, and yellow boughs to be seen already from my 
window; and there are two or three swallows fighting with 
the wind and all going one way. And, oh, I declare there 
go some leaves of the poplar tree swirling past! Hasn't 
the beginning of the end set in early this year? The elms 
in the Borough Field are tossing to and fro. Perhaps 
they're vexed like me. There are to be twenty police in- 
stead of six in Collon now, and several emergency men. 
Poor, quiet, peaceful little Collon ! We are dreadfully 
aggrieved." 

The next letter I come to is written on the back of a 
poem and bears no date beyond, "Collon House, Sunday 
Evening." 

"My dear Pet, — I've just come in from church, and 
I've put a match to my fire and I'm curled up on the rug, 
writing to you by the firelight. Now I'm going to tell 
you about the 'Rocking Chair' (i.e. the poem over-leaf). 
I had a most kind and altogether interested-in-me-ish 
letter from Father Russell, and he gave me all his views 
about the poem. He suggested one or two alterations from 
himself and one from Miss Mulholland, to whom he hap- 
pened to show it. But wait till I tell you what I've done, 
Katie alanna! When first I made it up I had something 
about a gate. Well, then, because I called it 'A Voyage,' 
I thought I must have something about sailing. But your 
letter, where you casually said 'In a Rocking Chair,' made 
me think how much prettier that was, so I changed the 
verses, as you see. I'm rather glad I had the patience to 
change it. Father Russell and Miss Mulholland liked the 
'quaint old room.' You know I feel so shy and inclined 
to hide my head when I think of them two actually taking 
the trouble to talk over a crock thing of mine. There's the 

[ 261 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

tea-bell ! Oh, I love you. Sure you won't leave off loving 
me?" 

"Mon. Morn. — Oh, Katie, if you could see the ecstatic 
colour of the trees opposite my window. I don't think God 
ever made such a good joy autumn as this!" 

The letters I have of hers have nearly come to an end. 
In the autumn of that year Mr. Wynne was instrumental 
in starting home industries in the Singleton estate, over 
which he was agent. Mrs. Singleton — "Violet Fane," the 
beautiful and fashionable woman of the seventies and 
eighties, who wrote poetry and a novel or two which were 
notable and praised, I fancy, more because of the writer's 
beauty and fascination than for their merits — was a distant 
cousin of the Wynnes, and Mr. Wynne managed her prop- 
erty. Through me apparently he had made acquaintance 
with Miss Skeffington Thompson and Mrs. Rae, the sister- 
in-law and wife of the Arctic explorer, and had got "tips" 
from them about the conduct of the industries, which then 
were less common than they are now. The industries gave 
Frances some work and interest. It will be gathered from 
the letters that she needed such. She had only some six 
years of life to run, and she was eager : enclosed in a walled 
garden of life she wanted the world, hungrily. She wanted 
to be about and doing, because the night cometh, and un- 
known to herself the shadow of it was about her. 

"Dearest dear," she says, "it seems decades since you 
wrote. Another week that you don't write you must send 
me a post-card. . . . Papa, Mother, and I went down 
to Cavan on Wed. morn. We drove thirty miles altogether 
that day. We interviewed Miss Thompson's Margaret 
McCullagh (who by the way has annexed herself to me, 
which is flattering, as she is a sturdy unemotional North- 
erner). On Thursday we drove down again to Shercock, 

[262] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

stayed at Carrlckmacross for the night, at a queer little hotel 
full of antimacassars, stuffed birds, and shell-boxes; and 
the Piers Court Home Industries were inaugurated. I do 
hope and trust it will be successful. The people of Cavan 
are grasping after money and very stolid. Papa and the 
parish priest impressed it very strongly on their minds that 
they wouldn't begin to earn money for their work till they 
had learnt it thoroughly. I daresay when some of them 
find that they are paid not a weekly wage but by the arti- 
cle, they will drop off. When we get things into working 
order you must try to get us some orders. I shall book your 
sister when she is ordering her wedding-garments. Mar- 
garet and her assistant work exquisitely. We got home 
late on Thursday evening, having driven fifty miles in two 
days. We came from Carrlckmacross to Dunleer (a sta- 
tion six miles from us) by train. We took two hours to 
do it, forty minutes of which we spent sitting in a siding 
in the dark at Dundalk, waiting to be attached to the 
Belfast train. I've spent a very bad, idle week. It's what 
I was doing this one little poem, and though it is now 
utterly savourless from repetition, and I know it's no good, 
yet it gave me pleasure to make it. I'll tell you how I 
made it. I was desperately lonely for want of a poem, and 
one evening, rather late, I was tilting backwards and for- 
wards in a queer old chair in the schoolroom which I much 
affect. When I tilted up I caught just nothing but that 
gold bit of sky quite covered with poplar leaves, flickering. 
When I tilted down there wasn't anything but the delicious 
fire-lit room. It was a good joy, and used to come back to 
me with a thrill every time I closed my eyes. ... I ex- 
pect by this time Mr. Meynell has sent back Marigolds. I 
am sure dear, nice Father Russell won't be above taking it. 
I sent him back The Wild Birds of Killecvy yesterday. I 

[263] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

do think it's a sweet book; and there's some really beautiful 
English in it. Miss Mulholland is a poet. Last night when 
I did go to sleep, which was between one and two, I dreamt 
that one of my 'tooths' dropped out. Kate says that means 
I shall lose a friend; but she assures me it isn't you! I've 
had the third volume of the Ring and the Book in the house 
for more than a week, and I haven't yet had a go at it. 
I adore the Ring and the Book. Isn't it lovely where he 
wished he had sat on the bench beside Pompilla that day 
instead of gathering the 'handful of spring herb and bloom' ? 
They are in from church, and I have to pitch my tent 
elsewhere." 

The next and last letter of my batch is written on the 
paper of the Piers Court Industries, of which by this time 
she was in secretarial charge. The letter is much shorter. 
Perhaps this employment of hers ended the very long let- 
ters. I miss one in which she described how she, the 
daughter of an evangelical household, used to devote an 
hour of the Sunday afternoon to reading the Catholic 
papers aloud to the servants — she sitting on the kitchen 
table, the adoring servants grouped about her. 

I have glimpses of her. Once it was at Canon (after- 
wards Bishop) Wynne's house in Leeson Park. He was 
Professor of Pastoral Theology in T.C.D., a benign man, 
with a good, gentle, somewhat narrow face. I always 
thought that Pastoral Theology must mean that he took 
his pupils out into the fields to teach. There came a num- 
ber of his divinity students to tea. Afterwards two of them 
accompanied Ada and Frances Wynne when they insisted 
on escorting me to the Shelbourne Hotel, where I was to 
expound the Nationalist cause in Ireland to Professor 
Dicey (!). It was an autumn or winter afternoon and 
the streets were lamp-lit and dark. Mrs. Wynne, Ada's 

[264] 



FRANCES WYNNE 

mother, protested against the two girls accompanying 
me — "Young ladies did not do such things in her day" — 
yet did not prevent them. One of the two accompanying 
divinity students was Mr. Hannay, now Canon Hannay, 
better known to English people as George Birmingham. 
He married Ada Wynne. 

For all her impatience with the restrictions of her life at 
that time Frances had not cast away the conventions. She 
was still horror-stricken at the thought of going for lunch 
or tea to anywhere but Mitchell's, the genteel shop in 
Grafton Street, Dublin. I'm afraid I forced her to accom- 
pany me to an ordinary restaurant, where I caused her 
still greater suffering by drinking beer with my lunch . An- 
other thing which used to horrify her was my habit of driv- 
ing on outside cars. I daresay it horrified some few other 
people, for Dublin was narrower in those days than it is 
now; but I took full advantage of my being a literary 
person, knowing that it would explain many eccentricities 
in my behaviour. 

I remember a phrase of hers which amused me. I had 
come across some people who had taken her up warmly at 
one time, and had grown less warm, as apparently was their 
wont. "Tell me," she said, "what they said about me." 
"Oh, very nice things," I replied. "I know they love me," 
she said; "but what I want to know is, is it a hatey love 
or a lovey love?" "Hatey love" is, I think, a phrase for 
which there has been a felt want. 

Four years after these letters were written she married 
her cousin, Mr. Henry Wynne, and went to live in London. 
For a time, before he took orders, they lived in Southamp- 
ton Row, high above the swirling tide of London life. 
Later on they went to live in an old house in Stepney Green. 
She seemed as if she could not have enough of life. She 

[ 265 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

plunged into It with the most extraordinary zest. She was 
excessively in love with London and the free London life 
after her walled garden of life in Ireland. She delighted 
in the East End shops, in the galleries of theatres, in crowds, 
in third-class carriages — in everything that spelt life to 
her. She was restless. She wanted to write, to see, to meet 
people. The thirst for adventure was bidding her "Hurry ! 
hurry!" because the time was short. She managed to get 
in the great experiences. She had known grief, she had 
loved, she was a wife and a mother. She died after a 
year and eight months of marriage, aged twenty-seven, leav- 
ing an infant of a few days old behind her. 

These letters seem to me as fresh, as warm, as breathing, 
as though they had come straight from her hand. Her 
poems were like herself, very lyrical, wistful, full of the 
joy of life, and eager for fuller draughts of it. Her one 
slender volume of poems. Whisper! was in the press when 
she died. The title, excellently chosen, seems to conceal 
and reveal a charming, shy, and roguish face that looks 
and runs away. 

Her poems, like her letters and herself, seem to me 
epitomes of girlhood. My excuse for giving so much space 
to the letters, if any excuse is needed, is that now that 
earth holds no more of her she may be forgotten unless 
one who knew and loved her keeps her with those words 
written straight from her own warm and impulsive heart. 
If others find the letters as fresh and charming as I do — 
like fresh violets after all those years — my keeping them 
needs no excuse. 



[266] 



CHAPTER XXII 

LADY YOUNG AND HER CIRCLE 

In the chapter on Frances Wynne I have mentioned an in- 
terview with Professor Dicey at the Shelbourne Hotel. 
That I could have had anything to say on the Irish Ques- 
tion to which Mr. Dicey would care to listen seems to me 
now extremely doubtful. I am amazed now at my own 
adventurousness that I ever went to that interview; the 
temerity of youth is all that I can plead in extenuation. I 
had not even enthusiasm to excuse me, for my interest in 
the Land League was not a sincere one. My one political 
enthusiasm began and ended with the Parnell "split." 

However, I was brought to that meeting with Mr. Dicey 
through my neighbour. Sir Henry Lawrence, and his 
mother, Lady Young, whose house, Belgard Castle, stood 
on a hill amid woods, overlooking my home nestling in 
the vale. Belgard had always been a place of romance 
to my childhood. The big square house had been attached 
to one of the old castles or keeps, which the English Pales- 
men planted all along their borders as watch-towers and 
protections against the O'Tooles and O' Byrnes, who used 
to sweep down from the mountains of Wicklow and raid 
the fat cattle of the Palesmen, and anything else they could 
lay hands on from time to time. Bel Card, to give it its 
Norman spelling, belonged to the family of the Talbots.. 
Once it was Emmeline Talbot, the young daughter of the 
house, who was carried off by a Wicklow chieftain, and 
loved and married by him. Thomas Davis wrote a fluent 
and not very good ballad on this story. 

The old keep, immovable as Time, still stands at the 

[267] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

corner of Belgard Castle, and gives it its descriptive title. 
The story about it is that a dead man lies unburied, walled 
in by solid masonry, in a chamber of the tower. I suppose 
it is true. The dead man was killed in the Tithe War, 
or by Ribbonmen, early in the nineteenth century. The 
story was that his brother swore he should go unburied 
till the murderer was caught and punished, and died before 
that could come about. 

The story, or the loneliness of it in winter, gave me an 
eerie feeling about Belgard; but it is a house beautifully 
situated, high up, overlooking Dublin and the plains of 
Dublin as they slope to the sea. It used to be said that 
you could draw a straight line through air from the hall- 
door steps of Belgard to the top of Nelson's Pillar, which 
is the highest point in Dublin. The house is stately and 
dignified. It has beautiful gardens, and there is the wild- 
ness about it which differentiates Ireland from England. 
From an Italian balustrading in front of the house you 
look down into a tangled orchard with a well in it. The 
house and the orchard and the well and the park are in 
many of my stories. 

Belgard is surrounded by an ancient buttressed wall. As 
it is so very old, it was always crumbling in one place or 
another. It was a Sisyphus-like task to keep that wall in 
repair. 

To Newlands, which adjoins Belgard, I have never pene- 
trated. It belonged to Lord Kilwarden, that noble and 
humane judge, who deserves a place in the Valhalla of 
Irish heroes, as well as some of those he sat to judge. He 
was killed in a street brawl in the Emmet rising of 1804, 
as irresponsibly and accidentally as Lord Frederick Caven- 
dish some eighty years later. They said that the manner 
of his death broke Emmet's fine, too sensitive heart. They 

[ 268 ] 



LADY YOUNG AND HER CIRCLE 

say that every night at twelve o'clock Lord Kilwarden's 
coach, driven by a headless coachman, passes through the 
gates of Newlands. I never met anyone who claimed to 
have seen it. Every old house had its ghosts. Another 
thing I used to hear about Newlands, which has had many 
distinguished tenants of late years, was that there was as 
much of it built underground as overground. 

Belgard, its orchards — there was a second one stretching 
along inside the wall — and its hinterlands, which seemed 
to our childhood to stretch far away into unexplored 
spaces, was a happy hunting-ground for us in childhood. 
Very strange and beautiful things grew and lived there. 
There used to be flights of little blue moths, fluttering about 
over the fairy ragweed and the shivering grass, and I re- 
member regiments of the most weirdly coloured fungi, 
bright blue and coral-red, standing under the trees in the 
belt of woodland which is inside the walls. 

Lady Young's father. Dr. Evory Kennedy, had been the 
owner of Belgard. He belonged to one of those great 
Northern families — the Napiers, the Rowan Hamiltons, the 
Temple Blackwoods, the Lawrences ; the Kennedys and the 
Lawrences were cousins — who have given such great sons 
to the Empire. In Sir Samuel Ferguson's skit upon the 
Orangemen you shall find mention of Colonel John Pitt 
Kennedy, the brother of Dr. Evory Kennedy, who was a 
Northern leader in the forties or fifties of the last century. 
Since it is apposite to our day it may be quoted. 

THE LOYAL ORANGEMAN. 

A am a loyal Orangeman 

From Portadown upon the Bann. 

Ma loyalty, A wull maintain, 

Was ever and always without stain. 

Though rebelly Papishes would call 

[269] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Ma loyalty conditional, 

A never did insist upon 

Nor ask condition beyont the one — 

The crown of the causeway in road or street, 

And the Papishes put under ma feet. 

It was when rebellion threatened the State, 

In the month of April in '48, 

A mounted upon my hackney 

An' off A set to General Blakeney. 

Says I, "Sir Edward, here we are, 

Six hundred mortial men of war. 

All ready and able, niver fear. 

To march from the Causeway to Cape Clear, 

And drive the rebels would da'ar to raise 

The Irish colours into the says." 

Well what div ye think my buffer sly 
Had the imperence for to reply? 
Says he, "Your offer's very fair, 
An' very timeous, too, A declare; 
For here we're all as one as besieged, 
And for your offer we're much obleeged, 
But you won't object, A hope, to mix 
In the ranks of the loyal Ketholicks." 

There was sittin' by, not lettin' on. 
That rebelly Papish Radintcn, 
An' that other Papisher rebel still. 
That fella they call Somerville. 
A gev them both, as A made reply, 
A look from the corner of ma eye. 
A said, "Make no excuse, A pray, 
For askin' us to serve that way. 
We'd not consider the trouble much. 
For we don't allow there's any such." 

Well, what do you think, sir? After that 
A thought A might put on my hat; 
You'd have given a pound to see the two. 
An' the look they gave as A withdrew. 
But hell to my sowl, if they didn't send 
An' ask me back by a private friend ; 
An' A seen the Colonel an' brave John Pitt, 
An' A got a gun, an' A hev it yet ; 

[270] 



LADY YOUNG AND HER CIRCLE 

An' if ever the rebelly Papishes d'ar 
Again to provoke the North to war, 
That Radinton, the rebelly dog, 
Is the very first man A'll shoot, by Gog. 

Besides being people of action, the Kennedy family were 
much associated with Art and Letters. The brilliant work 
of Colonel John Pitt Kennedy's son as an artist in the 
eighties will be remembered. He died untimely. Mrs. 
Alexander, the poetess, was a cousin. Sir Henry Law- 
rence's mother had married en seconde noces Sir George 
Young, Praed's nephew, himself a very elegant scholar and 
something of a poet. His translations of various Greek 
and Latin poets will be remembered. I remember Dr. 
Evory Kennedy driving to and from Dublin about those 
country roads when I was a small child. He was very hand- 
some and distinguished looking. He transmitted to his 
children the gift of great personal beauty as well as charm. 
At his house in Merrion Square, and at Belgard, he enter- 
tained all the notabilities of the day who came to Dublin. 
I have heard it said that he was the one person who re- 
ceived kindly handling in Carlyle's Irish Journal, apparently 
the one Irishman he met who did not irritate the bilious sage 
to madness. 

Belgard had been unoccupied for some years after Dr. 
Evory Kennedy's death. To that, I suppose, was due our 
immunity when we overran the place. Somewhere about 
the end of 1886 we heard that Belgard had passed into 
Sir Henry Lawrence's hands. This young grandson- 
namesake of the hero of Lucknow had just come of age. 
The shut-up house was reopened, freshened, and decorated. 
During the summers of 1886-87, and perhaps longer, Sir 
Henry Lawrence, with his mother as hostess, entertained 
parties of Londoners, mainly literary or political people. 

[271] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I was walking along a country lane one day with a St. 
Bernard puppy, which was a new and delightful acquisition, 
when I ran up against Lady Young. She was one of the 
most beautiful and distinguished-looking women I have 
even seen, well worth looking at for a long time. She was 
accompanied by another lady. My St. Bernard puppy 
frolicked upon them. I called him: "Sax, come here!" — 
his name, because he had come to me from England, was 
"Saxon." Lady Young asked, "What is Sax for?" 
"Saxon," I replied. "Oh, do you think an Irish girl should 
call her dog Saxon?" 

That was the manner of our becoming acquainted. She 
introduced me to her companion. Miss Arabella Shore. A 
few days later she came to see me, and in my absence was 
entertained by my father, with whom she was delighted. 
All women were. He could convey a compliment better 
than any man I ever knew, even if he did not speak it. 
He used to tell a story about one of the Gunnings, how 
she said that the finest compliment ever paid her was in 
the streets of Dublin, where one coal-porter said to another : 
"Look at her, Mick. Bedad, you could light your pipe at 
the fire of her eye." It must have been Elizabeth ; Maria 
would not have appreciated it. It was just like a thing he 
would have said himself. 

Anyhow, he took Lady Young and her companion — I 
forget who the companion was — round the garden and the 
cowsheds, and the barns and the stableyard, and the pig- 
geries, and sent her away much pleased with her entertain- 
ment. Not only that, but impressed with his wonderful 
intelligence as a practical farmer. She used to talk about 
it all to her London friends. And yet I think his practice 
was not always up to his theories. The man the other side 
of the hedge, who farmed in the manner of the Firbolgs, 

[272] 



LADY YOUNG AND HER CIRCLE 

made more out of it. I remember a certain hen-house on 
which he prided himself so much that we never could bear 
to tell him that it was a penal institution fitted to kill the 
hardiest fowl. One day a small boy who loved country 
pursuits came to see us. He walked about the place with 
his hands in his pockets, came in to lunch, and remarked : 
"That hen-house of yours, Mr. Tynan, will never do. It's 
too hot in summer and too cold in winter, and you'd better 
do away with it." "Upon my word, I believe you're right," 
said my father, who had doubtless known all the time that 
there was a flaw in his jewel, although he would not ac- 
knowledge it. Maybe he was glad to acknowledge it at last. 

After that I used to be pretty constantly at Belgard, 
where I met many interesting people. Mr. and Mrs. Henry 
Sidgwick were amongst them. I remember him as a 
pleasant, eager little man with a stutter. Mrs. Sidgwick 
was a person of much interest to me as the sister of Mr. 
Balfour, whom it had been our convention to hate, and 
whom we were beginning to love, half-willingly at first, 
and whole-heartedly in the end. A spare woman with a 
keen, incisive face, she had something of her brother's air 
of a philosophic tolerance. I am sure I talked more than 
I ought in such distinguished company, and she was gentle 
with me. 

Another visitor there I remember was Mr. (J. K. S.) 
Stephen — I remember him as a big, dark young man, 
massive, but yet soft. 

Perhaps these memories are hardly worth preserving — 
they are so indefinite after the lapse of years. But the 
memories are very pleasant. I remember one summer after- 
noon, when I encountered on the road a party of young 
Etonians, home for the holidays. They included Mr. 
George Young, who is now in the diplomatic service, and 

[273] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

was fortunate and brave enough to render "first aid" to 
the Queen of Spain when the bomb was thrown on her 
marriage-day. There was Geoffrey Young, who has written 
one or two distinguished vohimes of verse; and there was 
Hilton, the youngest, who has made some excursions into 
poHtics. They were deHghtful boys all three, with the 
charm of their father and mother, and it was exhilarating 
to meet them so joyous and so friendly on that summer 
afternoon. 

I believe I was at one political party, not at Belgard, but 
at St. Anne's Vicarage, in Dawson Street, where Lady 
Young's sister — a very beautiful creature — who had mar- 
ried Dean Dickenson of the Chapel Royal, resided. Dean 
Dickenson was a very witty and a very genial man. An- 
other of those lovely sisters was married to a Mr. White, 
an Englishman. He had grown-up daughters by a previ- 
ous marriage. They were typically English upper middle- 
class people, and they were delighted with the Dean's sallies, 
and always trying to catch up with them. Once someone 
was talking about the extravagance in attire of the Irish 
farmers' wives and daughters. It is a characteristic of 
Anglo-Ireland that it will fly out against any criticism of 
Ireland as no Celt will do. It may be very pro-English 
and pro-Union on one side; It will be very anti-English 
and pro-Irish on the other. Said the Dean: "Oh, I see! 
You'd rather they'd put their rents in your garments." 

I remember an occasion upon which the witty Dean may 
have been nonplussed. A half-silly, half-cunning country 
fellow was found mushrooming in Belgard park by the 
Dean, who ordered him off. Patsy moved along slowly 
with an air of not hearing or seeing, adding a mushroom 
now and again to the store he had collected. At last the 
Dean irritably put a hand on Patsy's shoulder to urge him 

[ 274 ] 



LADY YOUNG AND HER CIRCLE 

on his way. "Glory be to goodness!" said Patsy, lifting 
an eye to heaven, " 'tis little I thought that a poor man like 
me 'ud ever have Dane Dickenson fannin' the flies off me." 

Mrs. Dickenson's party was, I think, a political one, in 
honour of a visit paid by Mr. Goschen and Lord Hartington 
to Dublin, The family were all Liberal Unionists. I was 
at that party, but I did not reach the great men. I sup- 
pose I must have been the only Nationalist present. Irish 
people then lived even more in water-tight compartments 
than they do to-day, I remember the beautiful Mrs. Dick- 
enson, who was a joy to look at, saying to me that night, 
"Oh, but you are more important to any party you choose 
to belong to than any of us, for you have the brains." They 
acted as though they thought I had. It seems to me, looking 
back, that I had only an outward audacity which covered 
a despairing inward shyness. No one will ever know with 
what tremors I went alone to some of those gatherings. 
I remember stopping behind one of the beautiful thorn 
trees in Belgard park, when I was on my way to dinner 
there, feeling that I could not go on. After getting my 
heart quiet I did go on, to meet famous people and raise 
my small Nationalist voice amid the Liberal Unionists and 
Conservatives, many of them variously distinguished. 
Why, I think men have received the Victoria Cross for less 
courage than I had to summon up. And none, I am sure, 
ever suspected my doubts, my agonies. I dared to ex- 
pound the Land League point of view — for which I had 
no love — even to Professor Dicey, even to Mr. Balfour's 
sister, with shynesses none knew. 

To be sure I felt the charm of my hosts deeply. Sir 
George Young was charming. It was an ideal marriage. 
His gentleness to me was very great. Once I touched on 
a very painful topic ignorantly. It was the death of a 

[275] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

favourite brother in the Alps, of which no one ever spoke. 
I asked himself if he had not been an Alpine climber, with 
a hazy memory of something I had read. He got up and 
left me abruptly. How I suffered ! The next day brought 
me Mr. Justice Bowen's translation of the Eclogues of 
Virgil, with the most delightful, cordial, and friendly letter 
from Sir George Young. He also gave me a beautiful 
little edition of Praed, into which he wrote a long, unpub- 
lished poem. These are things not to be forgotten. I send 
my grateful thoughts back for all those kindnesses of long- 
dead summers. 

By a piquant contrast I went from the reception to Lord 
Hartington and Mr. Goschen straight to the O'Learys*, at 
whose house I passed the night. 



['276] 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THEOSOPHISTS IN DUBLIN 

A WEEKLY event of those years was Miss O'Leary's eve- 
ning at home. The brother and sister were very accessible. 
They used to love to sit surrounded by the young people; 
and one is pretty sure that those occasions were the fulfil- 
ment of a dream, at least to Ellen O'Leary; they were the 
few golden, tranquil years between wilderness and wilder- 
ness in which the brother and sister were together. 

There came the Sigersons, Richard Ashe King, Rose 
Kavanagh, John F. Taylor, Douglas Hyde. There came 
the three children of Johnston of Ballykilbeg, that Orange 
fire-eater, who was so gentle under the combativeness that 
it was said he was the most popular of all the Irish Mem- 
bers of Parliament with his own countrymen, including 
the Parliamentarians. I think he shared this distinction 
with Colonel Saunderson, who was admired and regarded 
affectionately by those he fought so straightly. But Colonel 
Saunderson was too open-air, daring, robust a person to 
be a true bigot, whereas Johnston of Ballykilbeg was one, 
a thorough fanatic, and yet with some honesty and sim- 
plicity and real gentleness of heart which thrust the bigotry 
into the background. 

It was an amazing thing to find his children at John 
O'Leary's house, at my own Sunday seances, at various 
houses which were either genuinely disaffected towards the 
British rule, or with academic inclinations that way. And 
yet, was it? 

It was more remarkable still when the young Johnstons 
began to have seances, and to bring all manner of rebelly 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

and Papistical people under their father's roof. Not un- 
known to him either, although Parliament usually kept him 
in London. I believe he appeared once or twice on these 
occasions. Certainly I was led up to him by his daughter 
on some occasion or other, and presented with a certain 
pride to the gentle-looking, silky-bearded, dreamy-eyed 
elderly gentleman, who was so little like the firebrand of 
the North of whom one had heard such terrible tales. 

There were two sons and a daughter, Lewis, Charlie, and 
Georgie, of the circle. Charlie was the moving spirit. He 
had plenty of brains, and he had the amusing impudence 
which well became his slim and pleasant youth. He and 
Georgie were as full of fads as ever they could be, in so far 
living up to their paternal derivations. Lewis, who was 
perfectly normal and very amiable and pleasant, would have 
had no fads at all if he was left to himself, but he was 
drawn into his brother's and sister's net. They were all 
three theosophists, vegetarians, total abstainers, non- 
smokers — in fact, their father's children, except as regards 
religion. They took me up with a great warmth. I re- 
member Charlie Johnston leading up various of his friends 
from T.C.D. — young men with ideas, or influenced by his — 
to present them to me. I think he delighted in my mockery. 
He had been a schoolfellow of Willie Yeats's at the Dublin 
High School, which has produced much brilliancy. Many 
of the young men were versifiers. One — Mr. Charles 
Weekes — had an amiable desire that I should give a title 
to his first volume of poems. I suggested, in Charlie 
Johnston's private ear, "Mr. Weekes, His Squeaks" ; but 
my confidence was not kept. 

I remember them coming to the crowded luncheon-table 
at Whitehall on Sundays, and the difficulty there was in 
providing them with vegetarian fare. An occasion came 

[278] 



THEOSOPHISTS IN DUBLIN 

when we jibbed. We had heard, or perhaps we only hoped, 
that they would break the vegetarian rule if they were 
forced to it. We were indiscreet enough to say that we 
believed they would be glad to be forced. The incautious 
speech got round, and on the next occasion they were more 
rigidly vegetarian than ever. Only the amiable Lewis set- 
tled himself to roast-beef contentedly, while the other two 
feasted on potatoes, peas, and fruit. 

I remember a time of bitter cold, such as does not often 
happen in Ireland, when there was a seance at the John- 
stons' of a frosty evening. The refreshments were green 
grapes and home-made lemonade, very strong and deadly 
cold. After which I crossed over to my sister's house some- 
where about midnight and demanded bacon and eggs and 
mulled wine. 

Beyond the circle about which I am talking and shall 
talk, there were one or two interesting figures who came to 
those Johnston seances, and later on to the O'Learys and 
other places which were meeting-places. There was a little 
Russian, with a small, wistful Calmuck face, named Lipp- 
man. He was supposed to be a Nihilist who had escaped 
from Russia. I remember Rosa Mulholland's horror when 
she met with a Nihilist at a social gathering in those days. 
Our borders were very wide: we did not mind a Nihilist, 
being used to revolutionaries of one kind or another. I do 
not believe he really was a Nihilist at all, but he had used 
Nihilism as a lever to get in with the English Socialist 
party — the academic Socialists, of whom William Morris 
was a leader, rather than what John O'Leary would have 
called the "transacting" Socialists. 

Lippman lived for a time at the Temperance Hotel of 
Mr. T. W. Russell on St. Stephen's Green. I went to at 
least one evening party given by him there, and Mr. T. W. 

r 279 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Russell came in and listened to us, saying very little and 
looking exactly what he was, a Scottish working man, en- 
dowed with more than common gifts, yet with some sug- 
gestion about him of not being wholly or merely practical. 
When the talk was of books he was outside it. 

Lippman was very small, very eager and apologetic for 
being alive. I have a vision, seen from a window, of a wet 
winter morning, and Willie Yeats and Lippman walking 
together, Lippman holding an umbrella over the poet's 
head. Both were wearing straw hats, the insignia of sum- 
mer; and Lippman was walking tiptoe, his hand extended 
as high as it would reach, trying to keep the streaming 
rain from the poet, who would have been scarcely aware of 
it if he were saturated. With or without rain, Lippman's 
face was always like that of a little dog striving to get ashore 
out of the water, his wet hair over his eyes, and his expres- 
sion one of a beseeching piteousness. 

Poor little chap ! he was a daring adventurer enough, but 
he was not able to get through with it. I remember that 
he gave me an autograph of William Morris, which I have 
stuck into my copy of the Defence of Giienevere. Having 
successfully, or unsuccessfully, raided Morris and others for 
loans of money he disappeared. In America he reappeared 
at a Fifth Avenue Hotel as Count Zubof, a Russian noble- 
man of immense wealth. Somehow or other he got in with 
New York's Ten Thousand ; had a glittering time generally, 
and was on the eve of marriage with a millionairess when 
the bubble was pricked. He was recognised and identified 
by one of his old-time Dublin associates, and escaped by 
blowing his brains out. I can never remember his unhappy 
little dog-like expression without a pang of pity. 

Charles Johnston introduced Theosophy into Dublin. 
We heard a great deal of astral bodies and mahatmas in 

[ 280 ] 




CiEORtiE W. Russell (A.E.) 



THEOSOPHISTS IN DUBLIN 

those days. He swept in a number of young people who, 
having discarded the extreme Low Church in which they 
were brought up, were ready to turn to something more 
interesting. 

His sister started the first vegetarian restaurant in Dub- 
lin, and used to walk about in a strange garment, half 
esoteric, half business-like, presiding over a number of dam- 
sels similarly attired. It did not attract Dublin generally. 
When I went there, there were always strange young men 
in mustard-coloured suits, wuth long hair, lunching ; but the 
teas were very good. I suppose Dublin is too careless gen- 
erally about its food to be satisfied when it does feed with 
deceptive beefsteaks made of vegetables that unduly inflate 
at first and depress later. I rather think even eggs were 
taboo at that particular restaurant. The food, I remember, 
was of the mushy order. 

Whenever I hear of vegetarianism I recall how Willie 
Yeats and I dined at a vegetarian restaurant somewhere 
about Charing Cross, when I was in London in 1889. 
There was a long and elaborate menu, but after the first or 
second course I felt that never again, as long as I lived, 
could I have any appetite, so Willie had the rest of the 
meal, my portions as well as his own. Afterwards we went 
to the Southwark Junior Irish Literary Society, founded 
by Mrs. Rae and Miss Skeffington Thompson, where Irish 
children were trained in the way they ought to go. Mr, 
Frank Fahy, who is a very delightful Irish poet, accom- 
panied us back to Westminster Bridge Station. I have a 
horrid recollection of the pangs of hunger I suffered, posi- 
tive starvation, on the homeward journey, while Willie 
Yeats chanted poetry into my ear, being quite unconscious 
of inflation or depression in his own case, as he would have 
been indeed if he were a fasting man, or if he was one of 

[281] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

those entertainers who undertake to consume an enormous 
amount of food within a very short given time. 

And this carries me on to the time when we used to 
visit at the O'Learys. There was a thieving maid, of whose 
proclivities Miss O'Leary was unaware till her wine-bottles 
began, most unaccountably, to yield up not wine, but water ; 
it was only by the repetition of this strange occurrence that 
she came to the conclusion that someone must be emptying 
and filling and resealing the bottles. Willie Yeats knew 
more about her proceedings, as indeed did I. On one occa- 
sion he hung his overcoat in the hall, with a couple of 
golden sovereigns just paid to him for an article in its 
pocket. When he resumed his overcoat the money was gone. 
He was chronically hard up, yet he was not at all concerned 
about the loss of the money. What absorbed his thoughts 
was speculation as to the state of mind of the thief and 
what her motives were, and as to how a dipsomaniac must 
feel deprived of that they love, and so on. 

He had an uncanny way of standing aside and looking 
on at the game of life as a spectator. He told me about 
this time of how he had sat a night long with a youth who 
had fallen into disgrace, and was in the depths, not to be 
left alone for fear of what he might do. I often thought 
of what a macabre situation it was — the aloof, speculative 
poet, and the poor human failure, distraught with his own 
misery. 

But to return to the Johnstons and Theosophy. Their 
most considerable recruit — apart from W. B. Yeats, who, 
I think, was so passionately absorbed in literature as to 
have only a transient and hardly sincere interest in other 
matters — was George Russell, whom we know now as A. E., 
our George then, the world's now. I find this entry in my 
diary for a day in December, 1887: *'W. Y. brought a 

[ 282 ] 



THEOSOPHISTS IN DUBLIN 

boy, George Russell, with him. Fond of mysticism, and 
extraordinarily interesting. Another William Blake." 
George Russell was very boyish when I first saw him — shy, 
gentle, incapable of the lightest form of insincerity, a most 
lovable creature, as he is to-day. He is of the world, un- 
worldly — the world's stain has never touched him; without 
religion yet profoundly religious; the peace of God which 
passeth understanding lies all about him now as it did then. 
He was brought up in the narrowest tenets of Irish Evan- 
gelicalism. I remember when his family were sorely dis- 
tressed by his association with Willie Yeats. Leaving be- 
hind him the narrow and ugly creed to which he was born, 
he has adopted no other form of Christian religion: he 
finds gods in the earth and the air — rather, I would say, 
he finds God ; and his life unconsciously has cast incense on 
the altars of the Unknown God. 

I have known in my time some few undoubted geniuses, 
three certainly in literature — W. B. Yeats, Francis Thomp- 
son, and George Russell. To which I believe I have added 
a fourth in James Stephens. In none of these have I found 
the beauty of genius as I find it in George Russell. His 
flame always burns upward clearly. There is no room in 
him for any of the small meannesses of humanity. There 
is something strangely benign about him. He keeps his 
image of God undistorted, undefaced, as few of us have 
kept it. When I am struck cold, remembering that such 
and such a one, something uniquely precious of God's mak- 
ing, is no longer of this world, I turn to think upon George 
Russell, that untroublesome genius. I am glad that in all 
probability he will survive me, for of him more than any- 
one else I have ever known I would say : "We shall never 
look on his like again." 

He was a shy, awkward boy, with the benignity and the 

[283] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

genius shining from him. He adored Willie Yeats and 
Charles Johnston. He extended his friendship to me. He 
joined those Sunday parties at Whitehall, and we met else- 
where. He was then an accountant at Pim's, the big 
draper's in George's Street, Dublin. During the day he 
wrestled with the prices of blankets and carpets, or perhaps 
he did not wrestle, for he has a preposterous gift for busi- 
ness of a sort — afterwards he made poems and stories, and 
he painted, painted, painted, putting the most lovely things 
on canvas, quite oblivious of how he cast them down and 
where; not caring greatly what became of them when they 
were done — feeling, perhaps, that the spilt oblation on the 
altar of the Unknown God is more precious than the hoarded 
one. He painted the walls and ceilings of the Theosophi- 
cal Society's rooms with his wonderful angels and fairies, 
his mystical dreams and fancies; for he is a mystic to the 
lips and further, as much akin to the Eastern as to the 
Christian mystics, although the teachings of his youth, arid 
and bitter, have closed the door for him on these last. If 
you go to see him to-day at Plunkett House, Merrion 
Square, where his business life, which is never without its 
golden and purple patches, is lived, you will find yourself 
surrounded by his angels. He told me the other day that 
he destroyed all his pictures which did not satisfy him : 
just as he sells them for a wholly inadequate price because 
he would keep them within reach of the poor man who was 
minded to give himself a luxury while he would think it 
dishonest to charge the rich man more. 

He gave his early pictures away to any friend who cared 
to have them. I am the fortunate possessor of several, in 
water-colours and oils, and black and white. He says the 
drawing is bad. Well, it may be, but there is no doubt 

[284] 



THEOSOPHISTS IN DUBLIN 

about the genius. Side by side with them hangs a charming 
head in crayons by WilHe Yeats. 

George Russell is a most delightful and voluminous 
talker. It is such talk as one grieves should be lost. It 
is wonderful talk. He told me a story the* other day of 
a friend of his who somewhere in the wilds of America 
became friends with an old Indian. He told him all the 
marvels of the old world — wireless telegraphy, radium, men 
flying in air, speech kept long after the speaker was dead. 
"Wonderful! wonderful!" said the Indian. "Tell me 
more." At last the reciter paused, wearied. "The white 
man is very wonderful," said the Indian. "Can he do 
this?" He stooped, lifted a handful of dust and threw it 
in the air; stretched himself upwards, and thin delicate 
flames ascended from his hands and his feet and his hair; his 
body shone in air; he was a living jewel from head to foot. 
Then the glory faded. There was only an old Indian. "Can 
the white man do that?" he asked. 

He tells such things in a low crooning voice as comfort- 
able as the sea's on a quiet day. He looks at you with 
wonderful eyes above the flowing of a great beard ; and one 
realises that he might have sat for God the Father to one of 
the old Italian painters. 

Which reminds me that models are of the things he 
abhors; looking upon them, I suppose, as mechanical and 
insincere devices. 

He used to be full of odd theories in the old days. One 
was that the motive-power of angels must be in wings from 
the backs of their arms and their feet, instead of wings from 
their shoulders. So he has made them in a black-and-white 
illustration for my Angel of the Annunciation, great wings 
of peacock's feathers from the arms, smaller wings from 
the feet. Another idea he had was that we should see the 

[ 285] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

world through different colours; and it was to please him 
that we filled in our half-glass hall-door with green and 
red panes. I remember with what satisfaction he viewed 
a snowy world through them. 

He was so shy and unassuming when I knew him first 
that he said little, only beamed, when he was of a party; 
but I remember a visit he paid me when we were alone, 
when we sat over the fire, and he told me the stories he had 
been making in his mind — I don't think he ever wrote 
them — strange, many-coloured, sparkling things, part 
flower, part jewel, with something of starshine and moon- 
light. 

He used sometimes to spend a night out on the Dublin 
mountains, where he had revelations and met strange peo- 
ple. He was always perfectly sincere and perfectly simple, 
so that when he told you of some wonderful meeting you 
only felt that it must have happened somehow. He told 
us in later years about his work under the I.A.O.S., the 
Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (what a mouth- 
ful!), of organising co-operative banks in the rural districts 
of Ireland. He was in a hostile district — the Irish farmer 
is suspicious — and he wanted to make friends and disarm 
suspicion as he went along. He began with the car-driver, 
who was taciturn and dour. "It just occurred to me," said 
he, as though anyone might have such a happy thought, 
"that he might know a fairy who belonged to that part of 
the country whom I knew. So I made a sketch on a page 
of my notebook, tore it out, and handed it to him ; he looked 
at it and nodded to me. We were friends." 

So, too, when he tells you that in one of his incarnations 
he was a dishonest merchant of Bagdad, and has to cleanse 
himself from that stain through successive incarnations, you 
receive it as though you were in the Arabian Nights. 

[286] 



THEOSOPHISTS IN DUBLIN 

He has a delicious humour, and a benignant one. It is 
a very human, and a very humane humour. His laughter 
sparkles over his fellows, and when you have laughed no- 
body is a penny the worse, but you are very much the better. 
Wherefore his sudden, unexpected vein of invective has 
something terrifying about it. When he condemns it is 
overwhelming, coming from this immense and almost bound- 
less tolerance, 

I don't know what they did at the Theosophic functions. 
I was of the Old Religion, and it afforded me marvels 
enough, so I made no excursions into Theosophy any more 
than I did into table-turning, and the planchette, before 
whose strange doings one of our circle, who had cast off 
Christianity with his parson's garb, used to tremble. I have 
often wondered at the capacity for strange beliefs and su- 
perstitions in those who have rejected Christianity. I have 
seen the emancipated daughter of a bishop almost swoon 
because she had seen the new moon through glass. 

I had an irreverent attitude towards Theosophy, which 
must have been a bit trying to my friends. Of course the 
Theosophists of my acquaintance were very young, and had 
a humourous sense of their own absurdities. Those young 
Theosophists were all supposed to have a vow of celibacy. 
They did not mind being twitted about it. But one fine 
day Charles Johnston married Madame Blavatsky's niece, 
and wrote to his friends that when they knew his wife they 
would pardon his change of opinion. I was the first to 
convey the staggering news to George Russell. He looked 
on it as an invention of the enemy. It was really a shock 
to him; and for the first and only time he did not beam 
at me. Some years later he followed his broken idol's 
example. 

A word more of the Johnstons and I am done. Miss 

[287] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Johnston started a debating society of an appalling dulness. 
She was quite ready to give me prominence in it; but at 
the first meeting — the subject under discussion being some- 
thing that could not possibly interest any human creature — 
I sat at the back of the meeting and displayed Liberty pat- 
terns to some I had led astray. After this lightness the 
society left me severely alone. I feel now that I must 
have been a horrible trial to my friends in those days. I 
used to call it the Philandering Society — it was open to both 
sexes — and other scoffing names. 

Courtship and marriage were severely banned by those 
serious folk. Great was the falling-away thereof. Not so 
long after her brother's marriage the sister married, and the 
last I heard of her was that she was inordinately devoted to 
a baby. 

By the way, Willie Yeats used to visit the Johnstons at 
Ballykilbeg. Charlie Johnston told me that the poet had 
been learning from someone about the eatable qualities of 
fungi — or, perhaps, "learning" is hardly the word. Any- 
how, he took to an indiscriminate eating of them which 
very much alarmed his hosts, vegetarians though they were. 
When I consider the number of times that Ireland was in 
danger of losing her premier poet I am dismayed. Happily 
some good angel kept guard over him, else literature — Irish 
literature especially — would have been immeasurably the 
poorer. 



[288] 



CHAPTER XXIV 

W. B. YEATS 

I FEEL that hitherto my references to W. B. Yeats have been 
somewhat in the direction of poking fun at him ; and I hope 
my readers have understood that the fun was affectionate, 
and that I am never for a moment without a deeply felt 
admiration and even reverence for his genius. 

All the world that cares about literature knows of his 
work to-day. I like to go back to the time when he was a 
boy, very simple, passionately generous to his friends, ab- 
sorbed in his art; ready with a superhuman energy to un- 
dertake the ungrateful task of sweeping away the whole 
poor fabric of the facile and the ready-made with which 
the young Irish versifiers before his day were content, and 
rebuilding, as he has done, the nation's poetry. 

We were terribly unexacting with ourselves in those days. 
We were appallingly easily satisfied with our achievements, 
as were our friends and critics. The amiable reviewers of 
the Dublin press, if they liked you, would salute your little 
work with a dreadful over-praise, likening you to so many 
shining ones of ancient and modern literature that you 
were reminded of the fine confusion of : 

"Maybe you are Pluto stout, 

Or jolly ould Bacchus, drunk and hearty. 
No, my lass, your eye is out, 
For I'm Napoleon Bonaparte." 

I myself have been compared to Sappho and St. Teresa in 
a breath. I have, moreover, been called a fine flower of 
womanhood, and a divinely gifted daughter of the gods. 
As for the English poets whom I had pulled down from 

[289] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

their high places and passed by, well, the list included 
everyone my reviewer had ever heard of^ which I rather 
think was summed up in Tennyson. I wonder if Tennyson 
subscribed to a press-cutting agency in those days, and if 
he trembled for his dominion. 

On the other hand, if you were not persona grata with 
the reviewers, what a pulling-down you might receive ! 

In the case of Willie Yeats's own Wanderings of Oisin, 
I can see now the red-headed, red-bearded reviewer to whom 
it fell, a man with real knowledge this time, to whom the 
indiscretions of foolish over-praise would l.e Impossible. 
"This fellow thinks too much of himself," said he, with that 
precious first volume in his hand, "and I'm going to slate 
him." And slate him he did. 

Before I pass on I must recall a story of the red-headed 
reviewer whom I hold in pleasant memory. He put his 
"big head" in at the door of his editor's room at the time 
when Stanley had taken out an expedition to join Emin 
Pasha, and he inquired In a voice which was like a long, 
low rumble of thunder: "Am I to treat this fellow as a 
buccaneer or a bagman?" He was leader-writer as well as 
occasional reviewer. "Bagman," said the editor laconically; 
and so it was done. 

However, this is a long digression. To return to Willie 
Yeats and the movement with which he had more to do than 
anyone else. In fact, he was "the onlie begetter" of the new 
Irish poetry. Heaven knows what rubbish he delivered us 
from! We were all vv^riting like the poets of a country 
newspaper, copying a simplicity of the older poets which had 
long ceased to be simple, aiming at a rhetorical passion 
which had never been sincere. 

I am not of those who see in the later young poets any 
likeness at all to Yeats. It is only that he showed us all 

[290] 



W. B. YEATS 

the way; and the young poets may be thankful for the 
rubbish swept away in those old days. Willie Yeats did 
the spade-work. He cleared the ground. 

Sometime towards the end of 1887, or the beginning of 
1888, the Yeats family went back to London. Mr. J. B. 
Yeats was of the happy sort who are immune from present 
ills by the fact that the Happy Islands are always just round 
the corner. If you find when you have gone in search of 
them that they are really behind you, well, then, the obvious 
thing Is to turn back again. So this was one of the migra- 
tions of the Yeats family in sure and certain hope of El 
Dorado, which, after all, was a spiritual state and always 
with the delightful, beloved, unpractical artist and poet. 

During the winter of 1886-87, I had seen a great deal of 
Willie Yeats. He never minded the five miles' walk through 
the wintry weather so long as he found at the end a fire, 
a meal, a bed, and a talk about poetry. Indeed, I really 
think he would not have noticed the absence of material 
comforts, but being there, he basked in them. I can see 
him now stretching out his long hands to the blaze — we 
always kept enormous fires — chanting poetry to himself 
with a slow delight. The Yeats of the Irish Theatre and 
of much petting and spoiling is, or may be, quite a different 
person. The Yeats of that time — well, I knew more about 
him than anyone else outside his own family; and I feel 
that I keep him as he was in those days. 

Looking back, it seems to me that there was something 
almost pathetic about him. He was so gentle, so eager to do 
what one wanted, so patient when one drove him hither 
and thither. He was made happy by so little kindness. 

I have somewhere the privately printed Mosada, with his 
father's sketch of him on the cover. It was a far cry from 

[291] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

that to a limited edition at six guineas. Possibly Mosada 
made me sure of what he was. It has beautiful passages. 

When he had gone back to England he came again from 
time to time. He was most adaptable in a household ; for he 
never cared what he ate or drank, or in what corner he slept, 
nor what he did for the matter of that, so long as there was 
someone to talk poetry with him. When he stayed with us 
and wanted to go to town, he was quite ready to take a 
seat with Tommy Merrigan, who drove a milk-van into 
town. The spectacle of the poet sitting up among the milk- 
cans is a weird one in my memory. Other young gentle- 
men occasionally accepted a seat in the milk-van, taking 
care to get off before they reached the parts of the city 
that counted. Not so the poet, who would drive through 
the smartest streets in the milk-van, unconscious or care- 
less that it differed from the finest carriage. 

To be sure, Tommy Merrigan was a congenial compan- 
ion. There was not a hedge or a bush that had not its 
phantom for Tommy. An amiable black dog, seen in the 
twilight, became the most horrible of Celtic evil spirits in 
Tommy's imagination. It was no wonder the poet forgot 
his equipage in listening to what Tommy could tell him. 

I was by this time writing more and more, and I had 
many absorptions and businesses as well. The poet used 
to come into my little sitting-room, where I sat at my desk 
with my back to the fire, subside into the one easy-chair 
the room contained, in which I am sitting as I write — I 
had a Spartan dislike of it in those days — with a cat in his 
lap, stroking it. He used to go down to the kitchen for 
the cat. As her presence annoyed my St. Bernard, who lay 
stretched on the hearth-rug, I vaguely resented it. The 
poet used to talk half-humourously to the cat. "Ah, do 
you see that great, noisy, foolish creature lying there? He 

[ 292 ] 



W. B. YEATS 

is preferred before you, who are sleek and wise and crafty, 
and keep your emotions, whatever they may be, to your- 
self. How shallow that creature is as compared with you !" 

These distractions used to annoy me. I have unfortu- 
nately the reputation with my friends of possessing a very 
good temper, which I do not altogether deserve. Even inti- 
mate friends will go on believing that I cannot be angry 
while I am at white heat. The poet never believed in my 
anger. He used to laugh when I said sharp things to him. 
Once I did a mean thing to punish him. I daresay I did 
many, but this I remember. I crunched sweets in his pres- 
ence, knowing he longed for them, for he was a child in his 
love of sweets, and would not give him even one. I remem- 
ber how grieved Miss O'Leary was when I told her of this. 
She was the first of those elder women who have found it 
pleasant to mother the poet. 

Sometimes I got rid of him by sending him to post my 
letters, while I did something which needed freedom from 
distraction. He was always gentle and docile in those days. 
He used to go off swinging an immense market-basket, 
with perhaps a solitary letter flying up and down in it, 
like the pea in the bladder. I used to tie down the market- 
basket so that he should not lose the letter. He went out 
through the milking-shed for a short cut. The men, milk- 
ing by candle-light, would see him flit by like the Flying 
Dutchman. I heard afterwards they called him the Sprite. 
It was some two miles to the post-office. There was a letter- 
box in the wall of Belgard, much nearer, but it was not 
safe to post there when the family were away, as they often 
were all winter. It was not worth the postman's while com- 
ing so far. One year a swallow made her nest in the letter- 
box, and found the derelict winter's letters very useful for 
domestic purposes. The poet used to do the journey in 

[293] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

seven-league boots, and get back again, blown but happy, 
just as I was setting to work. 

It must have been on one of those days that he was 
aware of a happening which he writes round about in "A 
Knight of the Sheep," in Celtic Tzvilight. My father was 
the "Knight of the Sheep," and though the incident was 
much more simple and more human than the poet records 
it, one or two little incidental touches in which he depicts 
my father are well observed. 

"Proud of his descent from one of the great fighting 
clans" (he was an O'Toole of Wicklow on his mother's 
side), "he is a man of force alike in his words and his deeds. 
There is but one man that swears like him, and he lives 
away on the mountain. 'Father in Heaven, what have I 
done to deserve this?' he says, when he has mislaid his 
pipe; and no man but he who lives on the mountains can 
rival his language on a fair-day over a bargain ... no 
soul that wears this garment of blood and clay can sur- 
pass him." 

My father had the Celtic picturesqueness of speech, which 
reminds me of the red-headed journalist, who asked if 
Stanley was to be treated as a buccaneer or a bagman, and of 
his exposition of Gaelic oaths, showing how English cursing 
was poor and ugly and coarse, whereas the Gaelic curse 
was a thing of beauty and force. He had forgotten the 
magnificent oaths of the Tudors, which were religious oaths 
in a sense; and that is why modern English profanity is 
ugly, because it has got away from religion. 

Between these comings and goings the poet wrote me 
many letters. I possess a great number of them, and they 
are all undated as to the year. But as I want to depict 
him as he was in those days, I will let him say a few words 
for himself, taking the letters at random; not looking for 

[ 294 ] 




\V. B. Yeats 



W. B. YEATS 

the curious and interesting things. His sister had gone to 
learn embroidery under Miss May Morris, which learning 
she has put to happy account in the lovely embroideries of 
Dun Emer and Cuala. 

"Lilly likes greatly going to the Morrises. Morris, Miss 
Morris says, once tried to do embroidery himself. He was 
going away somewhere, and he made Miss Morris thread 
him several hundred needles, as that was, he said, the hard- 
est part of the work. He gave it up, however. The other 
day he said there would soon be nobody in the world but 
Jews and Irish. Lilly asked him which would he be. He 
said certainly not a Jew. The other day he came in and 
said : 'All hands talk French' ; and then he started off into 
the most comic mixture of French and English. He is al- 
ways having a little joke of one kind or another, 

"I have seen several studios, amongst others, S 's, a 

good-hearted, vain, empty man. What a very small soul 
goes to a great piece of prosperity ! I hoped to have heard 
from you, but I suppose you are busy. You do not know 
what a satisfaction a letter is. Any breath from Ireland 
in this hateful London, where you cannot go five paces with- 
out seeing some wretched object broken either by wealth 
or poverty, is good. I took the proofs to Mr. Legge, and 
finding him out thrust them through his letter-box, and 
heard them spreading themselves out on the floor like a 
pack of cards. I am horribly irritable and out of sorts. 
Living over at Berkley Road by myself I tried experiments 
in cheap dining — for a man, if he does not mean to bow the 
knee to Baal, must know all such things — making my dinner 
off vegetables and so forth. After a time I was gaunt and 
nervous, and able to do little work, and since then I have 
had a variable assortment of coughs, colds, and headaches. 

[295] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I have met some literary men over here, with the usual 
number of bon mots and absence of convictions that char- 
acterise the class. One, however, has no bon mots and sev- 
eral convictions, a Welshman, Ernest Rhys, editor of the 
Camelot Classics. I like him. I recommended your poems 
to him strongly. Did I tell you I heard Henley praise your 
*St Francis and the Birds'? ... I expect naught has 
changed with you but your outer Nature. The wild-briar 
roses must be holding their festival now in all your lanes. 

"Lilly is still very happy at the Morrises. She makes 
cushion-covers and mantelpiece covers without end. She 
dines at the Morrises every day. Morris is greatly dis- 
turbed by little boys who insist on playing under his study- 
windows. He rushes out every now and then to drive them 
off. There is a parrot in the house that keeps up a great 
noise, whistling and sneezing and holding conversations 
with itself. He is used to the parrot and does not mind it. 
The parrot's favourite is one of the servants. It likes her 
because she makes so much noise, and hops all over the 
house after her, copying every noise she makes. 

"I am writing an article on an old blind Gaelic poet of 
the last century called Hefernan for the Scots Observer. 
He wrote the original of Mangan s *Kathleen-ni-Houlihan.' 
If this article does I shall most likely do other Irish writers 
for them. Henley has also recommended me to Chambers's 
Encyclopcodia for Irish subjects. I should rather like such 
work for the present, my great wish being to do no work 
in which I should have to make a compromise with my 
artistic conscience. When I cannot write my own thoughts 
— wishing never to write other people's for money — I want 
to get mechanical work to do. Otherwise one goes down 

[296] 



W. B. YEATS 

into the whirlpool of insincerity from which no man re- 
turns. I am to write a series of articles on the difference 
between Scotch and Irish fairies for some new paper. 
These articles are to be done on approval, but Henley feels 
small doubt of placing them. All will go well if I can keep 
my own unpopular thoughts out of them. To be mechanical 
and workman-like is at present my deepest ambition. I 
must be careful in no way to suggest that fairies, or some- 
thing like them, do veritably exist, some flux and flow of 
spirits between man and the unresolvable mystery. Do you 
know that passage in De Vere's Legends of the Saints on 
the hierarchy of the angels ? It is the most Miltonic passage 
written this long while. Not that fairies are angels. I am 
going to tell you a spiritualistic story. Do not be angry 
with me. I tell it because it is pretty. It is about Mrs. 

A K . After her death, M went down to her 

tomb and entreated her for days in his mind to make some 
sign that all was well with her. No sign came. The other 
day he handed a letter to a friend of mine who knew Mrs. 
K — , and asked whose writing it was. My friend at once 

recognised Mrs. K 's writing. He asked her to look at 

the date. It was dated in November last, long after Mrs. 
K 's death. This was the letter : 

" 'My dear , — You are losing your faculties. You 

could not hear my voice. I cannot speak to you through 
mediums.' " 

"The letter came from a young Scotch girl who had 

known Mrs. K so slightly that it is thought she had not 

even seen her handwriting. One night in the dark she had 
felt impelled to get writing materials, and under some in- 
fluence wrote this letter. She was then living in the High- 
lands. Her family said she was possessed by devils, and 

[297] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

have sent her to very strict relations in Ireland. I met 

M at Lady Wilde's last v^eek. He talked much of 

Mrs. K -; I could hear her name in every conversation 

he held. He is an old man with a shrunken chest. He 

praised her continually. Madame B says there w^ere 

two Mrs. K 's, one a good woman ; the other a woman 

of the world, who dyed her hair. 'She was good/ she 
added; 'but her progress came more from intelligence.' It 

was quite pathetic to watch M that day at Lady 

Wilde's. For the first time Mrs. K interested me. She 

must have been good to have inspired so many people with 
affection. . . . 

"1 have had one of my 'collapses' on. I have had it 
these last three or four days. It is a very uncalled-for 'col- 
lapse,' as I have given up going out in the evening to see 
anyone, so as not to get tired out. I find a single vigorous 
conversation, especially if any philosophic matters come up, 
leaves me next day dry as a sucked orange. 

"I do not think the ballad is of your best — not so good 
as 'The Heart of a Mother,' or 'St. Francis and the Birds,' 
or 'The Children of Lir.' I am not very fond of retrospec- 
tive art. I do not think that pleasure we get from old 
methods of looking at things — methods we have long given 
up ourselves — belongs to the best literature. 'St. Francis' 
was not retrospective. The St. Francis within you spoke. 
I do not mean that we should not go to the old ballads and 
poems for inspiration, but we should search them for new 
methods of expressing ourselves. Your best work — and no 
woman-poet of the day has done better — is always where 
you express your own affectionate nature, or your religious 
feeling, either directly or indirectly. Your worst — that 
which stands in your way with the best readers — is where 

[ 298 ] 



W. B. YEATS 

you allow your sense of colour to run away with you, and 
make you merely a poet of the picturesque. 

"You will be angry with me for this criticism. The 
youngest is always the best beloved. The want in your 
poetry is, I think, the want also of my own. We both of 
us need to substitute more and more the landscapes of 
Nature for the landscapes of art. The other change — a 
less important one — you perhaps need most. It is curious 
that your other fault — that of sometimes overstating the 
emotion — is only present when your landscapes are those of 
art. We should make poems on the familiar landscapes we 
love, not the strange and glittering ones we wonder at. 

"Here are two verses I made the other day. There is a 
beautiful Isle of Innisfree in Lough Gill, Sligo, a little rocky 
island with a legended past. In my story I make one of the 
characters whenever he is in trouble long to go away and 
live alone on that island — an old day-dream of my own. 
Thinking over his feelings I made these verses about them. 

" 'I will arise and go now and go to the island of Innisfree, 
And live in a dwelling of wattles, of woven wattles and wood- 
work made. 
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a yellow hive for the 

honey-bee, 
And this old care shall fade. 

There from the dawn above me peace will come down, drop- 
ping slow. 

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the house- 
hold cricket sings. 

And noontide there be all a glimmer, and midnight be a 
purple glow, 

And evening full of the linnet's wings.'" 



[299] 



CHAPTER XXV 

W. B. YEATS : SOME LETTERS 

Here is a very early letter, dated June 25, 1887. For once 
the poet remembered to date his letter. He had gone to 
see Mr. Montgomerie Ranking, a poet and reviewer, with 
whom I had had a friendship since he had given my first 
book a warm welcome in the Graphic two years previously. 
"I saw Mr. Ranking on Thursday. He is decidedly in- 
teresting, seems much disappointed and pathetically angry 
against everybody and everything modern, and yet is withal, 
I think, kindly. He looks older than in your photograph, 
and in his long dressing-gown was not unlike a retired and 
somewhat sentimental old cavalry officer, spending his latter 
days between a laugh and a tear. I fear despondence and 
indifferent health have left him little energy. I asked him 
did he know Watson's work, and recited : 

" 'In mid-whirl of the dance of Time ye start, 

Start at the cold touch of Eternity, 

And cast your cloaks about ye and depart. 

The minstrels pause not in their minstrelsy.' " 

When I came to the third line he gave the queerest little 
shudder and looked down at his dressing-gown, and I 
changed the subject. 

"I met, somewhile since, S . He it is who is to bring 

out that Irish poem book. On the whole, I hated S at 

first sight. 

" 'None ever hate aright 
Who hate not at first sight,' " 

but begin to like him now. 

"London literary folk seem to divide into two classes — 

[ 300 ] 



W. B. YEATS: SOME LETTERS 

the stupid men with brains, and the clever men without 

any. , I fear, belongs to the latter class. Ernest Rhys, 

and possibly Mr. Ranking, to the first. The latter is the 
most numerous. Young men possessing onJy an indolent 
and restless talent that warms nothing and lights nothing. 
Indeed, I find little good, with hardly an exception, in any 
of these young literary men. I feel malignant on the whole 

subject, and made myself uncivil, I fear, to young S , 

who seems, however, to bear no malice. He lectured on 
Irish Rebel Songs last Sunday sympathetically and well. 
I was introduced to Miss Morris afterwards. She is de- 
cidedly beautiful, and seems very intelligent. 

"Last Sunday evening I had supper at Morris's. Pictures 
by Rossetti all round the walls, and in the middle much 
Socialistic conversation. Morris asked me to write for the 
Commonweal on the Irish Question. However, though I 
think Socialism good work, I am not sure it is my work. 

"I find this hot weather very trying, and go about like a 
sick wasp, feeling a dull resentment against I know not 
what. I was introduced to W. S. — and hated his red Brit- 
ish face of flaccid contentment. I do not think I shall ever 
find London very tolerable. It can give me nothing. I am 
not fond of the theatre. Literary society bores me. I loathe 
crowds, and was very well content with Dublin, though that 
was a little too populous for me, but I suppose — 

" 'Whenever in the wastes of wrinkling sand, 
Worn by the fan of ever flaming time, 
Longing for human converse, we have pitched 
A camp for musing in some seldom spot 
Of not unkindly nurture, and let loose 
To roam and ponder those sad dromedaries, 
Our dreams. The Master of the pilgrimage 
Cries 'nay' ; the caravan goes ever on : 
The goal lies farther than the morning star.' " 

[301 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Next I take up a letter bearing an Oxford address. 

"T am down here copying a thing in the Bodleian. I 
copy six and a half hours a day, then go for a walk until 
tea-time, making up lines for 'The Countess' as I walk. 
After tea I read Kickham, for a couple of volumes of Irish 
Selections I am doing for Puttenham of Boston ; but on 
the whole I am too tired after tea to do much good at any- 
thing. I am in lodgings here, and do not know a soul. 
I lodge in the same rooms Vigasson (the Icelander who died 
the other day, a friend of York Powell's) lived in. The 
landlady is a good woman, with a pale ungenial English 
face; and there is a big engraving on the wall called 'The 
Soldier's Dream,' and two more of the Bartolozzi school, 
of children being led through the sky by a couple of 
guardian angels with pointed noses.* I am always glad to 
get away by myself for a time, and should be contented 
enough here but for the miserable allegory I copy out for 
Nutt. 

"Of course we shall be delighted to have you with us. 
You can have my study — to yourself if you like — to write 
in. Apropos of which Mrs. Stannard says, she cannot work 
unless all her family are in the room. She once tried to 
work alone, but cried for loneliness. 

"I have a good deal of work to do at present, more than 
I can manage, all at Irish literary subjects, which is as it 
should be. I wish you had made up the Irish novelists and 
folklorists. You with your ready pen would find plenty to 
say about them. There is a want for a short book on Irish 
literature — lives and criticisms of all the writers since 
Moore. Some day you or I must take it in hand. There 
is a great want for a just verdict on these men and their 
use for Ireland. The worst would be one's necessity of 
blaming so many whose use is not yet exhausted. Blake, 

[ 302 ] 



W. B. YEATS: SOME LETTERS 

I daresay, is the one big prose matter I shall try just yet. 
By big I mean not articles merely. Though Blake's book 
will be truly a biggish book. What a downpour it has been 
this afternoon. I have written to you instead of going for 
my walk. Now it is clearing up, and a sparrow is beginning 
to chirp." 

In another letter he tells of his way of life. 

"I have no news. One day here is much the same as 
another. I read every morning from ii to 1.30 at the Art 
Library, South Kensington Museum, where I am now 
writing — a very pleasant place, the air blowing through the 
open window from the chestnut trees, the most tolerable 
spot London has yet revealed to me. I then dine, and 
through the afternoon I write, as fate, and languor, the de- 
stroyer, will have it. In the evening I read out to my 
father, who is afraid to tax his eyes. Michel's (i.e. 
Mitchel's) Jail Journal has sufficed us for many days now. 

''There is a society at whose meetings Michael Field 
(Miss Bradley) is to be seen. It is called the Society of 
the New Life, and seeks to carry out some of the ideas of 
Thoreau and Whitman. They live together in a Surrey 
village. Ernest Rhys is to bring me to a meeting. Michael 
Field is a bird of another feather from those London 
litterateurs whom I cannot but rather despise." 

In another 1887 letter he talks of his various literary 
doings. He is very busy editing, criticising, and collecting. 

"My father does not wish me to do critical work. He 
wants me to write stories. I am working at one, as you 
know." (This would be 'John Sherman,' a real achieve- 
ment, the story of life and a soul in a stagnant little Irish 
town, in Sligo of his mother's people. There is a deal of 

[303] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

W. B. Yeats in 'John Sherman.') "It is almost done now. 
There is some good character drawing in it, I think, but 
the construction is patchy and incoherent. I have not much 
hope of it. It will join, I fear, my ever multiplying boxes 
of unsaleable MSS., work too strange at one moment, too 
incoherent at the next for any first-class magazine, too 
ambitious for any local paper. Yet I don't know that it is 
ambition, for I have no wish but to write a saleable story. 
Ambitious! — no. I am as easily pleased as a mouse in a 
wainscot. . . . 

"I must write in this letter no more bookish news, as I 
know you think me too little interested in other things. I 
am a much more human person than you think, and . . . 
have sometimes to bury my head in books like an ostridge 
in the sand. . . . My life is altogether ink and paper. 
But it is hard to go on working industriously for the MSS. 
boxes. It tends to bring about a state of things when one 
is too industrious to be idle, and too idle to be industrious. 
However, I am exemplary at present. I really do a fair 
amount of work, and I have written lately everything with 
a practical intention, nothing for the mere pleasure of 
writing, not a single scrap of a poem all these months. . . . 

"In looking over your letter I see that you are in hot 
water with Miss Johnston. You should remind her that 
George Eliot liked nothing so much as a talk about dress. 

"By the by, Russell is not so much a theosophist as you 
call him as a mystic of medium type. You must not blame 
him for that. It gives originality to his pictures and his 
thoughts. 

"Have you read the Fairy Tales yet? There are some 
that would do for ballads, I think. I shall some day try 
my hand at Countess Kathleen O'Shee and The Devil and 
the Hearth Money Man, the first in a more elaborate way 



W. B. YEATS: SOME LETTERS 

than a ballad perhaps. It is a subject that would suit you, 
I think. 

"I am reading- Tolstoi — great and joyless, the only joy- 
less man in literature, so different from Tourganeef. He 
seems to describe all things whether beautiful or ugly, pain- 
ful or pleasant, with the same impartial, indifferent joyless- 
ness. Also I have just read Meredith's Diana. He makes 
the mistake of making the reader think too much. One is 
continually laying the book down to think. He is so sug- 
gestive one's mind wanders. . . . How I long for your 
opinion on this little story of mine, a very quiet, plotless 
little story. But all this is too bookish. , , ." 

In his next letter he is talking of regular work which he 
hoped to get. He weighs the advantages and disadvantages. 

"I am anxious to look about me and become passive for 
a while. I have woven about me a web of thoughts. I wish 
to break through it and see the world again. The incident 

about pained me at the time, but now that he is out 

of my sight, if I heard he was dead I should not think twice 
about it; so thick has the web got. An accident to one 
of my MSS. or a poem turning out badly would seem of 
more importance. Yet I do not think I am an egoist. 
There are a few whose welfare is more to me than my own. 
It is all the web. If I had routine work for a time I could 
break it. 

"I went to see Madame Blavatsky the other day and 

found she had gone away, but had left the Countess W 

to look after her study. She even sleeps there, so close must 
she watch over the sacred MSS. When she heard I had 
been to a spiritualistic seance she told me she had gone to 
many, till Madame Blavatsky told her it was wrong. So 
you need not fear spiritualistic influence coming to me from 
that quarter. She told me of horrible things she has seen, 

[305] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

or believes she has seen, the medium thrown down by a 
spirit and half-stifled, the marks of fingers coming on his 
throat, and his clothes being set on fire. She declares she 
has seen distant places in mirrors and crystals. Being rich, 
she has travelled much in search of magic in its many forms, 
is a clairvoyant and has seen many visions, some beautiful. 
Has more titles than talent, but is interesting on the whole. 

"A sad accident happened at Madame Blavatsky's lately, 
I hear. A big materialist sat on the astral double of a poor 
young Indian. It was sitting on the sofa, and he was too 
material to be able to see it. 

"Last night at Morris's I met Bernard Shaw, who is 
certainly very witty. But like most people who have wit 
rather than humour, his mind is maybe somewhat wanting 
in depth." 

The next letter I come upon is from Sligo. 

"I went last Wednesday up Ben Bulben to see the 
place where Dermot died, a dark pool, fabulously deep, 
and still haunted, 1732 feet above the sea-level, open to 
all winds. Tracks of sheep and deer, and smaller tracks of 
hares, converging from all sides, made as they go to drink. 
All peasants at the foot of the mountain know the legend, 
and know that Dermot still haunts the pool and fear it. 
Every hill and stream is someway or other connected with 
the story. 

"I lived some days in a haunted house a little while ago; 
heard nothing but strange knockings on the walls and on 
the glass of an old mirror. The servant one evening, be- 
fore I heard anything, heard the tramping of heavy feet, 
the house being- empty. . . . 

"Am as usual fighting that old snake, revery, to get from 
him a few hours each day for my writing. 

[ 306 ] 




Lady Young 



Alfred M. Wiu-iams 





Sir Frederick Leighton 



Jonx J. Piatt 



W. B. YEATS: SOME LETTERS 

"Here is a little song written lately, one thing written 
this long while beside bare prose. 

" 'The angels are sending 
A smile to your bed. 
They weary of tending 
The souls of the dead. 

Of tending the Seven — 

The planets' old brood : 
And God smiles in heaven 

To see you so good. 

My darling, I kiss you, 

With arms round my own. 
Ah, how shall I miss you 

When heavy and grown.' " 

"I have just had Russian influenza, so can fix my mind 
no more upon this letter." 

Again he is back in London. 

"William Morris is greatly pleased with Oisin. I met 
him yesterday in Holborn, and he walked some way with 
me and talked of it. Not a soul have I yet heard from 
about the book. Even you have only written an age since 
when it was in proof, about the first two parts of Oisin. 
Rolleston wrote to say that he could have spared some of 
Oisin for the sake of Island of Statues. I was getting quite 
out of conceit with Oisin till I met Morris. 

"When I last wrote I was out of spirits, what with fatigue 
and being somewhat unwell. Whenever I write you a letter 
so full of myself and my sensations you may know that I 
am tired and unwell, either like a sick wasp or a cat going 
about looking for someone to rub itself against. ... It 
is pleasant to think that this letter will go away out of this 
horrid London, and get to the fields, and rattle along in 
the basket from Clondalkin to Whitehall. I wish I could 

[307] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

fold myself up and go in it. A ghost, you know, can hide 
in a diamond or any such thing. I suppose the buds are 
all coming out with you. Here there is snow on the 
ground." 

A little later he is at Rosses Point in Sligo again. 

"It is a wonderfully beautiful day. The air is full of 
trembling light. The very feel of the familiar Sligo earth 
puts me in good spirits. I should like to live here always, 
not so much out of liking for the people as for the earth 
and sky, though I like the people too. I went to see yester- 
day a certain cobbler of my acquaintance, and he discoursed 
over his cat as though he had walked out of one of Kick- 
ham's novels. 'Cats are not to be depended upon," he said ; 
and then told me how a neighbour's cat had gone up the 
evening before to the top of a tree where a blackbird used 
to sing every night and pulled him down. He finished 
sadly, 'Cats are not to be depended on.' 

"I enclose these trivial verses, the first fruit of my fairy- 
hunting. 

" 'The fairy doctor comes our way 
Over the sorrel-coloured wold ; 
How sadly, how unearthly gay ! 
A little withered man, and old. 

He knows by signs of secret wit 
The man whose hour of death draws nigh ; 

And who will house in the under-pit, 
And who foregather in the sky. 

He sees the fairy hosting move 

By heath or hollow or rushy mere, 
And then his heart is full of love, 

And full his eyes of fairy cheer. 

Cures he hath for cow or goat, 

With fairy-smitten udders dry ; 
Cures for calf with plaining throat, 

Staggering, with languid eye. 

[308] 



W. B. YEATS: SOME LETTERS 

Many herbs and many a spell 
For hurts and ailes and lovers' moan, 

For all save him who pining fell 

Glamoured by fairies for their own. 

Greet him courteous, greet him kind, 

Lest some glamour he may fold 
Closely round in body and mind, 

The little yi^ithered man and old.' 



"O'Leary tells me that you talk of bringing out a new 
book next year, and selecting the contents when I am with 
you. How glad I shall be to see you and go through the 
poems with you! London is always horrible to me. 
Nothing can make amends for the loss of green field and 
mountain slope, and for the tranquil hours of one's own 
countryside. . . . When you write always tell me about 
yourself, and what you are doing and thinking of. It is 
not so much news I want as to feel your personality through 
the ink and paper. Think of me in this matter as most ex- 
acting. You cannot tell me enough about yourself." 

With this I conclude, not daring to look further into the 
pile of letters which are so deeply interesting. The ex- 
cerpts I have made are chosen quite at random, and from 
one or two bundles of letters, the rest being unopened. My 
desire has been to show what a poet, who has more than 
fulfilled all that was expected of him, was like in his eager 
and fervid boyhood. I think the letters present a charm- 
ing personality, and it is a cause of great pride with me 
that I was so closely associated in friendship with the writer 
of the letters at a period when his work was just beginning. 
I feel that I have a bit of him which no one else has, in 
his simple and touching boyhood. It is curious to find my- 
self engaged in the attempt to humanise "Fairy Willie," 
as a friend of mine calls him. What courage ! What pre- 

[309] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

sumption ! I think he was human enough and very lovable. 
I wonder how I bullied him and drove him all over the place 
as I did. The ignorance, the hardness, the self-satisfaction 
of youth ! But at least he derived happiness from the friend- 
ship — that is plain enough in the letters; and doubtless he 
understood, perhaps even liked the bullying. 

Remembering the poems he has not written, I close this 
page of W. B. Yeats with a malediction upon the Irish 
Theatre, which could have dispensed quite well with the 
sacrifice of what was given for the supreme delight of 
mankind. 



[310] 



CHAPTER XXVI 



1887 had broiig-ht me a new friendship, that with the Ameri- 
can poets, Mr. and Mrs. Piatt. Mr, Piatt was American 
Consul at Queenstown. Some time in 1887 Mrs. Piatt's 
poems came my way and deHghted me hugely. I wrote 
an article about them in the Irish Monthly, and this led to 
our friendship and to my visiting Mr. and Mrs. Piatt at 
the Priory, Queenstown. 

However, it was certainly not in the radiant summer of 
1887 that my first visit was paid. That visit took place in 
cold and wet weather, and I remember coming back and 
writing a poem, "Rainy Summer," which fixes the year 
as 1888. 

The Piatts were a delightful couple. They had the abso- 
lute devotion to each other which belongs to American 
marriages when they are happy ones, as though the same 
people must exemplify marriage at its most perfect and at 
its worst. Mrs. Piatt always reminded me of a story I 
once read in Harper's, of a girl living and dreaming and 
loving in full flush of radiant life and beauty who suddenly 
looks in the glass and realises that she is old. Mrs. Piatt 
was incurably young in all her ways, only that she was 
sad because she was no longer young. They were a very 
quaint couple. Both of them were pretty constantly writing 
poetry, though you saw no evidence of it. I never heard 
either of them read a poem aloud or refer to their own 
poems, which only reached you when they saw the light of 
print. The two used to creep about together quietly in a 
ghost-like abstraction. Sometimes if you saw Mrs. Piatt 

[311] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

coming to meet you from the other end of a long corridor 
she would turn aside and vanish into a room, with a sudden 
access of shyness, I suppose. Once — it was the quaintest 
thing — I came upon her sweeping a room. Was it with 
an idea such as Miss Alcott had that "chores" were good 
for the soul ? I do not know ; but Mrs. Alcott was a New 
Englander, whereas Mrs. Piatt was a Southerner. 

At first I was a little afraid of Mrs. Piatt. I kept the 
discreet side of me turned out for several days. I talked 
poetry and authors and literary things generally. Then 
one day — we were sight-seeing in a proper round — coming 
down from Cork by steamer, we took refuge from the rain 
in the saloon or cabin. Opposite us sat a singularly comely 
youth, really good to look at, something debonair and 
gracious about him. As though I spoke to one of my own 
age I commented on his good looks to Mrs. Piatt after he 
had got up and strolled away. The girl who housed in her 
looked at me from her eyes. "I was just thinking," she 
said, in her soft drawl, "what a lovely young fellow he 
was!" After that we began to understand each other, and 
I supplied her something of the gaiety she was starved for. 

She was a very pretty, delicate woman, no longer young 
at that time. She had a look of being so light that you 
might blow her away. Perhaps it was her soft, fine hair, 
which blew out about her head, as that kind of hair has a 
way of doing. I have always believed that hair is a very 
sure index of character. The one other woman I know who 
has obstinately refused to be anything but a girl has just 
the same hair. Mrs. Piatt had had great sorrows, poor 
darling. One of her sons had been killed in America by 
the bursting of a rocket with which he was commemorating 
Independence Day; another had been drowned in the Lee. 
When the' girl in her was not pushing the sad woman into 

[ 312 ] 



1888 

the background, she spent much of her Hfe in a passionate 
companionship with her dead children. 

The living children were four robust boys, who had re- 
fused to go to school, and were amphibious, and a gentle 
delicate girl, rather like her mother, but without that 
mother's poetic gift, which is a considerable one. All those 
wet summer days I remember the rain streaming in sheets 
on the sea, and the Piatt boys drifting by in their boats like 
the Wandering Jew. They were as much at home in the 
sea, or on it, as a seal. I remember one of the boys reading 
all day long in his boat opposite the windows of the Priory. 
You could only see him when the sheets of rain lifted for 
a moment. I used to wonder about the condition of the 
book, for there was no attempt at shelter for either the 
reader or the book. 

I grew to love Mrs. Piatt very much. For several years 
I paid them a yearly visit at Queenstown. In the latter 
years a Sigerson girl generally accompanied me. 

I found myself in a very American atmosphere in the 
Piatts' house. I picked up all sorts of knowledge concern- 
ing American things and people. I made the acquaintance 
of many American writers in their books. The delightful 
old-fashioned house at the water's edge was a depository 
of Americana. There were many letters from American 
notabilities framed between sheets of glass, so that one 
could read the whole letter. One such was from Long- 
fellow; but there were some of a greater importance. The 
Stars and Stripes were everywhere in that house; the boys 
used to discuss American politics in a high nasal during 
meals. Such names as Levi P. Morton became a common- 
place to me. The boys were aggressively American, anti- 
British. The father and mother belonged to English litera- 
ture. Lamb would have loved them. 

[313] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

It seems to me in my memory of Mr. and Mrs. Piatt that 
they were always walking off the stage, hand in hand, their 
backs turned to us and the world. The boys used to make 
an incredible noise over their discussions. Seeing that they 
were all agreed, I can't imagine how they made so much 
noise. Mr. and Mrs. Piatt would sit silent through the 
hurly-burly with the air of being withdrawn into a cell, as 
though the noise passed over their heads. Now and again, 
when it was at its loudest, Mr. Piatt would interfere, pound- 
ing the table gently and saying, "That will do. I will have 
no more of this." The storm would subside amazingly. 
There was a legend in the family that Mr. Piatt could be 
terrible when roused. Mrs. Piatt used to look up from her 
dreamy abstraction and say, "John ! John ! restrain your- 
self!" Mr. Piatt always struck me as being one of the 
gentlest of men I ever knew. 

Mrs. Piatt used sometimes to look at the boys, brown with 
the sun and the sea-wind, in their weather-stained home- 
spun suits, and say, as though to herself, "Ah, well, they 
were lovely babies!" They were, as a matter of fact, very 
nice, good boys, so the remark can have conveyed no re- 
flection upon them. 

The Piatts had all the American capacity for passionate 
pilgrimages. Old storied places and literary shrines of one 
kind or another drew them like a magnet. Having nothing 
old in their own country, they adored what was old. I am 
reminded of an argument between two brothers, one seven, 
the other nine years of age. "The Reformation is quite a 
new thing," said seven years old. "It is quite old," said 
his brother. "Only 450 years," said seven years old. 

Nothing pleased the Piatts better than to meet literary 
people; and like many Americans, I am sure they would 
have been happier in Europe than in America. It is like 

[314] 



1888 

the Middle Ages, when all the gentle and high-minded ones 
slipped into convents, leaving the ruffians to carry on the 
world. The gentle spirits escape from the strenuous life of 
America to the cloister of Europe. Nothing delighted them 
more than a visit to London in the season, with a special 
eye to seeing literary people. Yet the American amour 
propre was easily wounded. The only time I ever saw 
irritability on Mr. Piatt's part was when I referred to Hardy 
and Meredith as great men. I don't think he really doubted 
their greatness, but perhaps he had some suspicion of my 
attitude towards some of his idols. I certainly had begun 
to revise my early judgment of — say, Longfellow, by that 
time. 

That visit gave me the very first glimpse into the strait- 
lacedness of speech in American family life. We were all 
strait-laced then, but Irish reticence was as water unto wine 
compared with American reticence. The mere mention of 
an interesting family event caused such manifest embar- 
rassment at the Piatts' table that the transgressor did not 
know whether to laugh or cry. There was a piquant con- 
trast in the American newspapers with which the house 
was littered, plain-spoken as Holy Writ. 

The Piatts, husband and wife, are a fragrant memory. 
Dear Mrs. Piatt, yesterday's rose, wherever she is, I send 
my heart's love to her. 

That visit after nearly a quarter of a century I recall as 
something chilly and sweet, chilly as to the wet summer, for 
the Piatts had not acquired the Irish habit of fires at all 
seasons. I had some very cold bathing that year, and my 
breakfast-tray used to come up to my room with a chilly 
wet rose upon it, and a little plate of strawberries, cold and 
wet too. And there was Mrs. Piatt, a little moonlight 
figure, full of delicate femininity, and an old-fashioned al- 

[315] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

most old-maidish sweetness : underneath it very warm and 
human, and turning eagerly to my robust gaiety and my 
stories. Twilight used to settle down on the little house 
with the robust boys gone to bed and the father and mother 
filling their diaries — they kept voluminous diaries — and the 
pretty daughter, with something of her mother's air of a 
tired rose, would play the saddest music, and Mrs. Piatt 
would come in like a little gentle ghost and say: "I don't 
know what you are playing, Marian, but I cannot endure it." 
In the night one would hear the big liners coming in, 
puffing like grampuses, to the harbour. At dawn Mrs. Piatt 
used to steal out to bathe. She loved the sea and the dawn. 
In one of the most beautiful of her poems I see her dear 
beloved little soul plain. 

"Some sweetest mouth on earth bitter with brine, 

That would not kiss you back you may have kissed, 
Counting your treasures by the night lamp's shrine, 
Some head that was your gold you may have missed. 

Some head that glimmers down the unmeasured wave 
And makes an utter darkness where it was, 

Or flung back in derision lights some grave, 
Some sudden grave cut deep into the grass. 

If so, there shall be no sea there; and yet, 
Where is the soul who would not take the sea 

Out of the world with it? What wild regret 
In God's high inland country there must be! 

Never to lift faint eyes in love with sleep 

Across the spiritual dawn and sec 
Some lonesome water-bird standing dream-deep 

In mist and tide : how bitter it would be ! 

Never to watch the dead come sailing through 

Sunset or stars or dews of dusk or morn 
With flowers shut in their folded hands that grew 

Down there m the green world where they were born. 



1888 

There shall be no sea there. . . . What shall we do? 

Shall we not gather shells, then, any more. 
Or write our . . . names in sand, as here, we two 

Who watch the moon set on this island shore?" 

In 1887 I had begun to keep a diary — a very scrappy 
one, which I might easily have made better. From it I 
gather that my career as a prose-writer began about 1888. 
My friend, Rosa Mulholland, had been urging me to write 
prose, but I doubted my ability. It must have been in 1887 
that Mr. Alfred Williams of the Providence Journal came 
to Dublin, and asked me to write for his Sunday Journal. 
Mr. Williams was an Englishman settled in America, with 
an extraordinary flair for literature and that curious passion 
for Ireland which is found in many an English breast. He 
wrote one or two excellent books himself — one on Celtic 
folklore, the other a biography of Sam Houston, the Texan 
leader. In the Providence Sunday Journal, a very wilder- 
ness of a paper, one discovered the stars in the English 
literary sky, while they were yet only on the horizon. I 
remember the delight with which I first read "Danny 
Deever" there, and Meredith's short stories, and other 
delectable things. 

Mr. Williams was visiting in Ireland Mrs. Banim, the 
widow of Michael Banim, the Irish novelist. The poor lady, 
who was blind, or nearly blind, had just come back from 
Belgium, where she had been living for twenty years or so 
with her two daughters, Mary and Matilda. The Banim 
sisters contributed constantly to the Providence Sunday 
Journal, Mary writing articles and Matilda illustrating them. 
They were very quaint ladies, for they had not modified 
the fashion of their dresses since they were young, so we 
had the pleasure of meeting ladies with a ringlet over either 
shoulder wearing dresses frilled to the waist, with pointed 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

bodices, loose sleeves, undersleeves of lace and net — in fact, 
the dress of the sixties. 

Mr. Williams found nothing amiss. He was suffering 
from a weakness of the eyelids, which made it difficult to 
keep his eyes open. And to be sure there was nothing amiss. 
They had only stepped out of Cranford. They had the 
etiquette of the sixties too, for some small omission of 
mine met with a kindly, yet stern rebuke from Matilda; 
and she must have been the first of the suffragettes, for 
detecting in me a dreaminess which connoted a sentimental 
frame of mind she was very sharp on the subject of men, 
assuring me that women were quite competent to carry 
on the affairs of the world without any assistance from 
men, and that it was only the slavish woman who thought 
otherwise. 

Mr. Williams was very happy with the Banims in the 
little Dalkey house, where they lived with their books and 
their writing and drawing, in a very pleasant, refined at- 
mosphere. He had lost a beloved young wife, and still 
grieved passionately for her behind those half-shut eyes of 
his. I daresay his happiest moments were spent in that 
autumn of 1887 in the little white house overlooking the 
sea, where he and the Banims used to sit up into the small 
hours talking Irish folklore and Irish poetry and such 
delights. 

Mr. WilHams made me begin seriously to write prose. 
My diary for 1888 is studded with cheques from the Provi- 
dence Journal. I invariably spent the money as soon as I 
got it. I fear I was a dreadful spendthrift. Writing prose 
for the Providence Journal set me on to writing prose for 
other things, chiefly American magazines and papers. It 
must have been in 1887 that I earned £58, and Father 
Russell warned me not to expect to double it next yean 

[318] 



1888 

"Oh, indeed now, take care. Don't expect too much. 
Above all, be a good child and say your prayers." 

Looking up my old account-books I find that in 1887 
I earned £58, ii.y. sV^d- In 1888 I earned some £90 odd; 
in 1889 I got up to £124, 5 J. 4d.; in 1890 I earned 
£132, i^. 2d. ; in 1891, £171, 13^. 2d. So that I was steadily 
progessive. 

I got rid of my money as fast as T received it. I take 
a page at random to show how it was spent : 

s. d. 

Sweets ........ I 6 

Cards 7 

Cards 60 

Figs 7 

Train i 11 

Silk for bodice 76 

Hair washing ......10 

Tea 12 

Picture 64 

Catullus 3 4 

Ties 26 

Sweets 7 

Soap 8 

It seems a frivolous list. You must take it that I leave 
out the serious items. I always had a great delight in keep- 
ing these accounts. They gave me a business-like feeling, 
as though I saved the money when I was really spending it. 

I began writing for the Catholic World of New York, 
the magazine of the Paulist Fathers, in 1888, with a series 
of articles on the leading Irish politicians. Very high- 
falutin they seem as I turn them over, till I am arrested by 
this strange sentence in an article on Mr. Parnell : 

"He has received popular adulation which might make 
many a great man tete monUe, and has remained grave, 
simple, sincere, quiet almost to coldness, though the fires 

[319] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

may bum within. I have seen him at some of his greatest 
moments, in that wonderful triumphal procession of his on 
an October Sunday in 1881, when 

" 'The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway, 
The church spires flamed, such flags they had, 
A year ago on this very day.' 

"An ominous quotation, did you say? — yet scarcely 
ominous for this patriot, although in Dublin streets Henry 
Grattan, dear and venerable name! was stoned by the 
populace." 

Alas, alas, and alas ! He was to have a greater procession 
on an October Sunday in 1891, when our hearts were 
broken as we followed him to his grave. 

That year 1888 was spent between work and "playing 
about," as the pregnant phrase of the Cockney has it. Not 
very much serious. No incursions into politics, though I 
was still enterprising and managed to get to the City Hall 
to see Lord Ripon and John Morley receive the freedom 
of the city in February of that year. For the rest, private 
friendships and friends; Dr. Kenny, a politician too ideal 
for any politics except Irish politics; Richard Ashe King, 
and others. Dr. Kenny lent me books and was kind — he 
was the kindest creature alive; no one ever knew how he 
lived, for he would take no fees from a friend and all the 
world was his friend. Mr. Ashe King, who came to an 
evening meeting at the O'Learys, brought great joy into 
my life and the lives of the group of friends, the Sigersons, 
&c., with whom I was much at that time. 

Mr. King lived at Waltham Terrace, Blackrock, a little 
cul-de-sac of delightful cottage houses wrapped in flowers. 
His house, Number 11, was one of those quaint houses 
which I have seen nowhere else except in the environments 

[320] 




Louise Imocen Guiney 




Dr. James Legge 



1888 

of Dublin, of two floors, a flight of steps going up to the 
hall-door on the second floor; the lower floor on the level 
of the garden. That little house stands out in my memory 
as one of the dearest things I have ever known. The very 
thought of walking up from Blackrock station and turning 
in at the Terrace — ''Waltham 1840" (I won't swear to the 
date) carved on one of the stone piers at the end of the 
road — brings me a rush of golden memories. Mr, King 
was very fond of his girl friends, and they of him. He was, 
and is, the writer of the Book Letter in Truth, so that he 
lived surrounded by all the new books. You could borrow 
practically anything you liked, and he was one to give, 
and give generously. 

•He always had very delightful little lunches, giving us 
the dishes we had expressed a preference for. I believe it 
was always the chickens and bacon of my choice ; for where 
there are many chickens people often prefer other things, 
so the dish must have been something of a novelty to me. 
He used to have much fruit, many sweets, cigarettes, and 
curaqoa, a true woman's banquet. I have rather a cloying 
memory of the sweets and the cura(;oa. I used to smoke 
cigarettes in those days, epatant le bourgeois, and was vastly 
delighted when I was told that a certain gentleman who 
had visited Whitehall one Sunday, being asked by someone 
what I was like had replied in chilling tones : "When I tell 
you she smokes cigarettes I have said enough." But I never 
became a smoker, although I smoked to keep my friends 
company. It gave me no such agreeable soothing sensa- 
tion as my smoking friends talked of. I used to say that 
being constantly of my father's company, and he being a 
tremendous smoker of strong tobacco, I was inoculated 
against such mild things as cigarettes. 

We would arrive at Mr. King's for lunch and remain till 

[321] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the evening shades were falling. Various other people used 
to be there, old and young, middle-aged and elderly. I 
believe the luncheon-table was usually young, for I remem- 
ber the happy intimacy of it. The married ladies came in 
after lunch. We used to bristle with jokes. I remember 
one of my own which amused Mr. King. I said that my 
friend, Blanche Fagan, who was a living rose, was partial 
to Hims, Ancient and Modern. 

Anything more kindly, more unselfish than Mr. King as 
host, I cannot imagine. Not only did he give us sweets, 
but he invited our sweethearts. Golden days, indeed ! Per- 
haps the happiest were when my dear Mary Gill used to 
drive over to tea, and carry me back to dear, hospitable 
Roebuck in her comfortable brougham, with perhaps, in the 
later years, at all events, one other guest. 

From about 1884 onwards I bad really begun to live. I 
had found out what I could do, and being regarded as an 
exceptional person at home and abroad, I had perfect free- 
dom about my actions. I had as many masculine friends 
as I liked, and saw as much of them as I wished. Politics 
did not interest me just then. Except for that reference 
in my diary to the conferring of the freedom of the city 
on Lord Ripon and Mr. John Morley, I do not seem to 
have touched politics, although I kept in touch with 
politicians. 

The little table of expenditure I have given earlier has 
shown that I played cards. Well, the society at my father's 
house in those days was mixed : it was intellectual and un- 
intellectual. With the unintellectual, I played cards, and 
I really enjoyed playing cards almost, or quite as much, 
as I enjoyed discussing poetry. Cards, I believe, were de- 
vised for the unintellectual, to take the place of gossip. We 
used to play Nap in those days and Spoil Five; and we 

[ 322 ] 



1888 

often saw daylight in. Sometimes the intellectuals took a 
hand. I remember Douglas Hyde being a past-master at 
Spoil Five; but when he played Nap and went Nap he 
always began with a lower card, having the ace in his hand. 
He explained that he was sure of winning with the ace 
whenever he played it. Such are the limitations of the 
intellectual, 

I have since found my taste for card-playing invaluable 
in English country life. 

I lost and won various sums in those days, and often 
knew what it was to go to bed bankrupt and to play a 
losing game all night in my dreams. A sister of mine was 
philosophic about her losses. She said she was perfectly 
certain that at the end of the year everyone had won a little. 



[323 ] 



CHAPTER XXVII 

1888-89 

In the autumn of 1888 began a certain matter of much 
interest to myself, which interest continues happily; and I 
imagine the thoughts of that autumn were nearly all inti- 
mate and personal, as were those of the succeeding spring, 
till I went to London towards the end of May. 

Before going on to the London life I must speak here 
of my neighbours and friends, the Furlongs, a family con- 
sisting of a father, mother, and four daughters, who lived 
not far away in a cottage in the Dublin mountains. Of 
the four sisters three wrote poetry. They were wild, leggy 
young things, with manes of black hair, like mountain 
ponies; and they were always chattering about poetry and 
the things that make poetry at the top of their cheerful 
young voices. They had a beloved father, brown and hand- 
some, who was proud of them and teased them, and had a 
great strain of poetry in himself — though by profession he 
was a sporting journalist, and anything he did not know 
of horses was not worth knowing. Someone said that when 
he came into a Dublin newspaper office at night where the 
gas was flaring, the place throbbing with the engines, flim- 
sies flying, everything going at fever heat — for in those 
days the newspaper men did not set to work till the last 
possible moment for producing the paper — he brought the 
fields with him. 

The young lean sisters were always producing poetry 
then — always reading and admiring; full of generosity and 
innocence and simplicity; loving their mountains; saying 
their prayers ; living in the best of all possible worlds. 

[ 324 ] 



1888-89 

James Furlong was killed in a gallant attempt to stop 
a runaway horse at a race-meeting, where the sacrifice of 
his life saved the lives of some of the crowd at all events. 

He lived just one night, during which he fumbled in- 
cessantly for his notebook and pencil when he was not crying 
out, "My God ! the mare's off ! Stop the mare !" 

Mary Furlong became a professional nurse, volunteered 
to nurse typhus patients in one of those mysterious epi- 
demics which occasionally break out on the western sea- 
board of Ireland. She was a darling nurse — a gawky, 
spiritual young creature, with honest eyes and the kindest 
heart. She contracted the typhus herself and died a young 
martyr. Katie died of consumption. Maggie, the one girl 
who was not a poet, married a poet, Mr. P. J. McCall. 
Alice still lives and writes beautiful poetry and poetic prose 
in a nook in the Dublin mountains, almost within sight of 
her old home, near her "Dead in the Green Glen," to whom 
she has cried so much of her touching poetry. 

Another friendship which began in those days, but was 
yet a matter of correspondence, was with Anna Johnston, 
who under the name of Ethna Carbery had won her place 
as a poet and poetic prose-writer before her early death in 
1902. Alas! so many of those friends died early deaths. 
There are in Ireland the people who die very young, and 
the people who live to be very old. Wherefore Ireland is 
full of memories with the fragrance of crushed spikenard 
and myrrh. 

Among the editors I was writing for just then was a 
certain mysterious "M. Bertram," who lived in Paris and 
ran a magazine called East and West. No magazine could 
have been run in a more unbusiness-like fashion, but the 
payments were all right, and they were always made in 
Bank of England notes. Someone printed and published 

[ 325 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the magazine in London, and I may say that the produc- 
tion was scandalous. "Nor were English maids Wind to 
his Irish beauty," in an article of mine, came out: "Nor 
were English made blinds," &c. The proof-reading, welll 
I have had a line of poetry — 

"Seeth he under the lone, awful sky" 
reproduced as 

"Seeth he down the lane, awful sly." 
And 

"A gold crown on your hair, my dear," 

come out as 

"A gold crown on your chair," 

to the inextinguishable laughter of the Irish editor who was 
responsible. 

Also in a story intended for convent consumption chiefly, 
a girl who spoke of herself as "a great ould botch" appeared 
with the "o" of botch changed to "i." 

These were bad enough; but I suffered as much from 
the proof-readers of East and West as I have ever done from 
Irish proof-readers. 

There was a mystery about "M. Bertram." That pay- 
ing in Bank of England notes was part of the mystery ; she 
would not sign her name to a cheque. We achieved a cer- 
tain degree of intimacy by letter-writing. I believe I was 
"My dear Katie" to her, and she "my dear M. Bertram" 
to me. She was very generous; she paid what was asked. 
I am glad to remember that I took no advantage of this 
generosity; but once, when she procured through me some 
poems from a certain American poetess now dead, she paid 
a fancy price. After a time there was a certain note of 

r 326 3 



1888-89 

anxiety in her letters, as though her funds were running 
low. She could not edit herself. I thought afterwards she 
wanted me to edit for her, although she never asked me. 
None of her contributors knew anything about her. She 
wrote in the hand of a person who has learnt to write in 
France, a difficult, cramped, legible handwriting, every let- 
ter formed with exactitude. I went to see Mrs. L. T. Meade 
at the offices of Atalanta one day. She also wrote for "M. 
Bertram," and was exercised over the mystery. She told 
me that she had heard from someone who made inquiries 
that "M. Bertram" was the cook at the address to which 
we wrote. 

I do not remember when my correspondence with "M. 
Bertram" ceased, or when East and West faded into the 
limbo of forgotten things. But some twenty years later 
my friend, Louise Imogen Guiney, wrote to me that a friend 
in America had written to her : "Going through the papers 
of an aunt who lived all alone in Paris we came upon a 
bundle of letters from your friend, Katharine Tynan. From 

this we gather that Aunt ran a magazine of her own 

some twenty years ago. None of us suspected it. We used 
to wonder how she got rid of her money." So there was 
the mystery solved. 

I went to London in May, 1889. My dear friends, the 
Meynells, almost the oldest of my friends now, and none 
more dear, had been asking me to come for some time; but 
I had engrossing interests just then. However, at last I 
made up my mind and went, remaining in England some 
four months. 

Turning up my diary I am amazed at my strenuous doing. 
I arrived on the evening of the 27th, travelling by the 
North-Wall express, which at that time was timed to reach 
London about 9.30, and got in anywhere about 11. The 

[327] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

next day the Meynells had a musical party in the after- 
noon, at which I met some old friends and made some new 
ones. Mrs. Thompson, the mother of Lady Butler and 
Mrs. Meynell, had been in the house all the morning, 
at the piano. She was an impassioned musician, and 
most wonderfully young. I remember her stopping, with 
her hands on the keys, to say that she knew where the 
birds got their songs from. They were taught note for 
note by the angels. Then she went back to improvising the 
most delicious bird-notes and thrills. 

Of the musical party 1 remember that I wore a Liberty 
red dress, with angel sleeves, that I drank more iced coffee 
than I like to think of now, and that someone was talking 
to me on the stairs, when he were "Hushed!" for the play- 
ing of the Kreutzer Sonata. 

Unfortunately my diary entries are of the scantiest. *T 
went here," "I went there" ; I suppose I was too busy to 
be more explicit. 

That same evening we went to what was really a memora- 
ble party, at Sir Charles Russell's house in Harley Street. 
There were present as the principal guests Mr. Gladstone, 
Mr. Parnell, and Lord Randolph Churchill. It was in some 
sense a rehabilitation — I might easily get a better word — 
of the Irish leader, after the breakdown of the Parnell Com- 
mission. The three statesmen had dined at the house. 
Afterwards there was a crowded evening party, out of which 
I remember a few things. Lord Randolph Churchill I did 
not get near at all. To Mr. Gladstone I was introduced. 
He had retired into a corner with Miss Wyse, the sister 
of Sir Thomas Wyse and an old friend of his, and was 
out of the crush, talking with his old friend. My principal 
memory is of Mr. Parnell. I would not have approached 
him, seeing how he was thronged about — he was the man 

[ 328 ] 



1888-89 

of the hour and the occasion — only Wilfred Meynell led 
me up to him. His eye fell upon me, and I am quite sure 
his face brightened. Was it because I was an obscure little 
Irish follower of his in the great London crowd? Was it 
with some premonition of the passionate loyalty that would 
have died for him in a day yet to be ? He had been listen- 
ing to all the sweet and adulatory things that were being 
said to him with an exquisite, chilly courtesy. His face 
brightened — I am sure of it — as his gaze found me out, 
hesitating. He took my hand and held it in a clasp which 
was not cold. 

"Oh, Mr. Parnell, you don't remember me," I said. 
"You've seen me in Ireland ; but, of course ..." 

"I remember you perfectly," he said. *'I have been read- 
ing your poems." 

Now this overwhelmed me, for we had always believed 
that Mr. Parnell's reading was of the most practical. 

"Yes, indeed," he said. "I have been reading them at 
Avondale." 

Others besides myself commented on the warmth of Mr. 
Parnell's reception of me, and I was congratulated on every 
side. I don't think he had cared very much about his re- 
habilitation. Perhaps I brought him the mountains and the 
fields of home. 

I wrote a little account of that memorable party for the 
Boston Pilot, to which I was a contributor in those days. 
I believe I sent my only copy to Lady Russell, for I can 
find no trace of it among many articles of the time, and 
it was not acknowledged. I met Sir Charles a little later 
at Crabbet, and I asked him if she had liked the article. 
"She would prefer nothing had been written about it," he 
said. "Oh!" murmured I, and fled, feeling as though I 
wanted the earth to swallow me. 

[329] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

On Friday the 31st of May I went with Mrs. Meynell to 
the very first Women-Writers' Dinner. Literary London 
had made prodigiously merry over the dinner. I think it 
was Mr. Barrie who wrote a screamingly funny article, 
from the male point of view, in the Scots Observer, under 
the heading: 

"On the 31st ult., at the Criterion, the Literary Ladies 
of London — of a dinner." 

We were prodigiously excited over our dinner, and very 
shy. We rather imagined reporters in the garb of waiters. 
We all tried to look as though we were quite used to hav- 
ing a dinner on our own account. Most of us smoked after 
dinner. I remember Amy Levy, that tragic personality, 
who had so short a time to live, sitting opposite to me, 
her charming little Eastern face dreamy in a cloud of 
tobacco-smoke. 

She died in the following autumn, by her own hand. 
She had made previous attempts at suicide. The story was 
that she and another distinguished writer, at the other side 
of the world, had made a compact to die together at the 
same time and hour. The other writer still lives. I have 
a letter somewhere from Amy Levy, asking me to tea 
one day that summer. I could not go, and afterwards I 
had poignant regrets, as though I might have done some- 
thing if I had come to know her better. But I dare say 
she was doomed, poor, gifted little soul. She had written 
more than one novel. Rciihen Sachs seemed to me at that 
time to promise big things. She had one or two good 
friends. Dr. — now Sir W. — Robertson Nicoll had encour- 
aged her, and had run Reuben Sachs as a serial in the 
British Weekly. She told me he had been very good to 
her. But perhaps no one could have held her back from the 
way she meant to take. 

[ 330 ] 



1888-89 

I believe Mathilde Blind was in the chair at that first 
dinner. I did not care for her poetry, and I disliked her 
harsh, guttural voice. Clementina Black impressed 'me with 
her air of capable honesty. She was a great friend of poor 
Amy Levy, and, doubtless, if anyone could have helped 
her to live and carry her burden, it would have been she. 
Another new friend was Graham Tomson, afterwards Mrs. 
Marriott Watson, beautiful with her dark face and unlifted, 
passionate eyes, in a Liberty garment of yellow silk. 

There was a little to-do about getting cigarettes, which 
had to be asked for before they were brought. Someone 
grumbled that there were no liqueurs — not so much that 
liqueurs were desired, as that it was a wrong to woman not 
to provide them. I complained to Mrs. Meynell afterwards, 
to her amusement, that certainly the waiter must have 
thought me a total abstainer, since he only gave me one 
glass of champagne. A good deal of water has flowed 
under the bridges since then, when we sat to a dinner 
which so far as the Criterion could ensure it was perfectly 
lady-like. 

My next event of public interest was the Herkomer play 
at Bushey, then the quietest of little country stations and 
villages. We trudged through summer dust, past hedge- 
rows whitened by the dust, from the station to the country 
village in which were Herkomer's two small communicating 
cottages, scarcely distinguishable from their humble neigh- 
bours. The big red-brick house was growing up behind on 
the ruins of the gardens. 

The play was a conventional thing enough. As usual, 
I was interested in the people. The President of the Royal 
Academy, Sir Frederic Leighton, walked back with us to 
the station. I remember his soft hat, his grey clothes, his 
spats, and, better still, the ruddily handsome face and 

[331 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

grizzling beard. Going up to town in the train we had 
for travelHng companion Miss Dorothy Dene, who was so 
often Sir Frederic's model. She was beautiful, I think, and 
beautifully dressed. The line from ear to chin, and the 
white throat, were lovely under the flowing ostrich feathers 
of her big hat. Women's dress was good to look at in those 
days. Oh, for another aesthetic movement to banish the 
most hideous and grotesque fashions of to-day, in which the 
women who wear them set forth their own unfitness to be 
taken as reasonable creatures! For the rest. Miss Dorothy 
Dene belied her beauty by talking a deal of nonsense in the 
fashionable slang of the day. 

On Whitsunday I find from my diary that we supped 
with the William Sharps. They were living at that time in 
the wilds of Hampstead, in one of a row of newly-built 
houses. I had heard of them as cousins who had waited 
seven years to be married. William Sharp looked as though 
he exuded health and strength. He was almost Philistine 
in his air of well-being. At that time Fiona Macleod was 
yet in the dim distance. I knew nothing of William Sharp's 
work beyond his editing. Both husband and wife were 
kind and interested in me, as indeed everybody was that 
golden summer. I may say here that I do not even yet 
believe that William Sharp was Fiona Macleod. But of 
that more in its proper place. 

One of those days Sir William and Lady Butler came to 
lunch, and I had to play hostess, as they came at the last 
moment and Wilfred and Alice Meynell were unavoidably 
absent. I was very much delighted with them. I had been 
warned that Lady Butler was somewhat deaf, but I forgot 
all about it. In her case then and now her bright intelli- 
gence reads the words on your lips. I did not at all feel 
shy of the great soldier, and altogether it was a most happy 

[332] 




General Sir William Butler 



1888-89 

occasion. That same evening Vernon Blackburn came back 
from Fort Augustus, where he had all but taken his final 
vows as a Benedictine. But — no: there must have been 
an interval, for he had just come from Rome. He brought 
various bits of Venetian glass and other curios : one I re- 
member was a little hat of the Bersaglieri for Alice Meynell, 
who almost wept because it recalled Rome. 

That summer the Meynells' house in Palace Court was 
a-building, and they had a temporary home in Linden 
Gardens, Bayswater. When I came first the lovely children, 
who might have tumbled out of the sky of some Florentine 
painter, so round, so soft, so exquisitely coloured were they, 
were there ; but presently they went off to the Isle of Wight 
with their nurses, while their parents sat down in London 
to watch the progress of the new house. Monica, the eldest, 
soon came back; she grieved so much at the separation 
that she had to come back. My memory of that summer 
takes In Vernon Blackburn playing and singing at the piano 
pretty constantly, and Monica, a lovely child, like a brown 
velvet pansy, delighting us with her pranks. We used to 
dine at restaurants every night and led a most Bohemian 
existence generally. 

Again there came to London Mrs. Alexander Sullivan of 
Chicago, In great trouble this time because her husband 
had been arrested for the murder of Dr. Cronin. We were 
all sympathetic and set out to be very consolatory, but after 
the first she brightened up so much that we concluded she 
knew everything and believed that he would be soon re- 
leased, which he was. I think she had the deliberate in- 
tention at that time of appearing everywhere she could and 
meeting as many people — of facing the music, so to speak, 
and confuting by her presence those who might have be- 
lieved her husband guilty. One afternoon I was going to 

[333] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

tea at the Temple with Mr. J. G. — now, I think, Sir J. G. — 
Legge. The Pennells were to be of the party and Mr. 
Fisher Unwin; I forget who else. I had been on a shop- 
ping expedition, and met Wilfred Meynell, who was ac- 
companying me to the tea-party, on the Embankment out- 
side the Middle Temple Gardens. To my embarrassment, 
Mrs. Sullivan was with him, and plainly proposed to ac- 
company us. I was not the one to frustrate her. How- 
ever, the thing went off very well. Neither host nor fellow- 
guests seemed to be aware of anything difficult in the situa- 
tion, and I was very grateful to them. 

I went down to Oxford for the Encaenia that year and 
stayed with the Legges in Keble Terrace. Dr. Legge was, 
oi course, Chinese Professor, and a very dear, charming 
old man. He had snow-white hair, bushy eyebrows, and 
side whiskers, the blue eyes and pink and white complexion 
of a child. "Lovely as a Lapland night." 

Dr. Legge had been a Methodist missionary in China. 
He had great simplicities. His daughter told me on arrival 
that she had never mentioned that I was a Papistical per- 
son, "because papa is rather old-fashioned." She also 
begged me not to be offended if he made any disparaging 
remarks about my religion. So much I willingly promised. 
That was of a Saturday. The first evening Dr. Legge 
looked at me but said very little. The next morning I went 
to early Mass at St. Aloysius's. Dr. Legge, who was then 
well on in the seventies, used to rise at four o'clock every 
morning, make himself a cup of tea, and work away through 
the quiet hours at the Chinese folios which no one but him- 
self knew anything about. As I let myself in, on return- 
ing, very quietly, the door of Dr. Legge' s study opened 
and he appeared on the threshold. He invited me to come 
in, and I entered the study, hung with Chinese scrolls, 

[334] 



1888-89 

walled about with Dr. Legge's life-work in the shape of 
Chinese classics, which the Oxford wits used to say might or 
might not be genuine, since none but Dr. Legge himself 
knew anything about them. I gave myself up for lost when 
he remarked: "You're a Roman, I see." I answered in 
the affirmative. He kept his blue eyes fixed on me till I 
began to wonder what bombshell was coming. At last he 
spoke : "We two are irv the same boat," he said in his 
strong Scotch accent. "The Church people; they'd burn 
us." 

After that an entente cordiale was established between 
us. He was a dear, beautiful, kindly old man, a child for 
all his abstruse scholarship. I once heard him speak with 
indignation of somebody's lectures — literary lectures, which 
were crowded. Indignation was so foreign to him that I 
asked somebody why it was. "Don't you see," I was 
answered, "only about four men attend his lectures; and 
of them not one can tell if he knows the subject or not. H 
he were minded to play a practical joke on the University 
of Oxford . . . ! But there, he doesn't look like it." 

He was justly proud that he had refused a chair at a 
Scottish University in his young manhood because he would 
have had to conform in some way; and after all an Oxford 
chair awaited him. 

He had appalling moments of frankness. Once at a 
dinner-party he hovered about looking for the lady he was 
to take In. Finally he stopped before a velvet-clad matron. 
"My daughter told me I was to take in the oldest lady pres- 
ent,"' he said. There was a moment's gasp. Then — "and 
I believe I'm beginning at the wrong end." 

On the same occasion someone asked him if he had not 
been left some enormous sum on trust by some old lady. 
Yes — it was quite true. The bequest was for missions to 

[335] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the Chinese. We opened our eyes at the magnitude of 
the sums Dr. Legge mentioned so carelessly. At the end 
of the narrative he added very quietly: "The puir lady 
had a delusion. She left nothing but her debts, which I 
was to pay out of the sum that had no existence." 

He had charming daughters. Of the eldest, a sunny 
brunette, bubbling over with laughter, a laughing goddess, 
It was said that every man in Oxford, from Jowett down to 
the youngest undergraduate, was in love with her. A good 
many women, too, I should think. 



[336] 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
1889 

I HAD a very gay time at Oxford that summer. Once I 
went down the river to Bagley Woods with a Mr. Ross, 
one of Dr. Legge's pupils, who was going out to China as 
a missionary. He was extremely good-looking, but very 
sententious. He gave me the tiller of the boat and I turned 
her into a bed of water-lilies. While I tried to explain to 
him that she zvoiild go that way in spite of me he remarked 
chillily, "The boat has absolutely no volition of its own," 
which remark reduced me to silence. 

We went to undergraduate luncheons of cold salmon in 
mayonnaise, cold lamb and salad, strawberries and claret 
cup, in the colleges. We went to college concerts, where 
the gardens were lit with Chinese lanterns till it was a feast 
of jewels. We dined with the Provost and Fellows of 
Corpus Christi in hall. We went to garden-parties, where 
there was a deplorable absence of male youth, and a pre- 
ponderance of bald heads and grey beards. We were at the 
Encaenia and on a college barge for the procession of boats 
and the bumping. 

Midway of my visit I was called back to London to spend 
a week-end at Crabbet Park with the Blunts. I got leave 
from my kind hosts and I went. I saw Sussex first in the 
leafy July of an ideal summer. Crabbet is buried in woods, 
and through the woods run a string of lakes, wrapped about 
in fox-gloves, meadow-sweet, and water-mints, sheeted with 
water-lilies giving forth their delicious smell. 

Miss Wyse, whom I have mentioned before as having 
been at the memorable party at Sir Charles Russell's, trav- 

[337] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

elled down with the Meynells and me. We found a party 
on the lawn. There were a Mr. Brand and Captain Brand, 
sons of the Speaker (not yet Lord Hampden, I think), and 
the wife of the former, who looked exactly like one of Du 
Manner's tall, beautiful ladies. How beautiful such a 
woman could be in 1889! To-day it is a Bedlam world of 
women. We were rather shy. After tea we strolled in 
the direction of the lake which lies in front of Crabbet. 
Captain Brand, a naval captain — I think he was a Sea 
Lord — got into a boat and stuck fast in the weeds. His 
beautiful sister-in-law's peals of laughter somehow broke 
the ice of our shyness. 

At dinner there joined the party the son and daughter 
of Sir Hugh Wyndham, who, at Rogate, might be counted 
as neighbours of Crabbet Park, the son a very pleasant 
young soldier, the daughter a gracious and lovely memory 
to me. The accident of my mistaking her for another 
Pamela Wyndham was the means of bringing me to one 
who had a very happy influence on my later life. 

Mr. Wyndham was my neighbour at dinner, and we 
talked of Oxford, of which I was rather full. He was an 
Oxford man, and interested in all I had to say about his 
Mother University. I commented on the general level of 
good looks among the undergraduates. "Ah, yes," he said : 
"the plain ones go to Cambridge." I told this a little later 
at Cambridge, and the jest was received with a chilling 
silence. 

After dinner the guests who were not staying in the house 
departed. Mrs. Meynell, Miss Wyse and I left the dining- 
room (it was, by the way, a dining-hall, a gallery run- 
ning round it — a very beautiful room) with Lady Anne 
Blunt. Immediately outside the door she took a candle- 
stick from a number on the side-table. "As Sunday morn- 

[338] 



1889 

ing is always an early one," she said, "I hope you will ex- 
cuse me," and off she went. We did not even know where 
the drawing-room w^as. We had been out of doors till the 
dressing-bell rang. We did not know what to do. Finally 
we decided that we also had better retire. As we went 
round the gallery to the corridor on which our bedrooms 
opened we saw below us the male members of the party 
playing dominoes at a table under the gallery. Dominoes 
was a very favourite game with Mr. Blunt. We watched 
them unseen. I think it was then we gave up hope. We 
thought them settled down for the night. So we took 
refuge in our bedrooms, not foreseeing the amazement of 
the host at finding an empty drawing-room. 

The next morning we had Mass said by a Capuchin from 
Crawley in the private chapel of the house. The meek, 
tonsured figure in the brown habit might have stepped out 
of the Middle Ages. It was beautifully in keeping with the 
Sussex country, with the English country which lost so 
much of its poetry with the passing of the friars. I would 
rather attend Mass in a private chapel or an ordinary room 
than in the most beautiful Cathedral. Heaven comes so 
much nearer in the little spaces. I have a most vivid mem- 
ory of that morning, of the June wind blowing over the 
Sussex woodlands, entering sweetly at the open window, 
of the stirring of roses by the pane, and the cooing of doves 
outside. I had lain awake in the night, hoping to hear the 
nightingales, but it was too late for them. I had to wait 
ten years before I should hear them. 

Crabbet was conducted on principles of the most absolute 
freedom. You came to a meal — except dinner, of course — 
to find your host or hostess going away. You helped your- 
self or some fellow^-guest helped you. Breakfast was on the 
table all the morning. 

[339] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

During the morning we did exactly as we liked. I liked 
to drift about in a boat on the lake. In the afternoon we 
went with Lady Anne for a walk through the woods, and 
to see the Arab horses. They were wild, beautiful creatures. 
Mr. Blunt at that time bore a certain resemblance to his 
Arabs. His young daughter, who rode with him in the 
afternoon, had the same look of a wild and soft shyness. 

Lady Anne had her pockets full of sugar for the horses. 
They were great pets, and would come thronging and press- 
ing about us, trying to get their noses into Lady Anne's 
pockets in search of the sugar. It was a little alarming to 
be in the midst of a herd of the beautiful wild creatures. 
Lady Anne pushed them away with an open hand on their 
soft muzzles : and if they were over-persistent she rapped 
them sharply with the little riding-whip she carried. She 
was a little woman with a dear brown face and a look of 
simplicity and courage, very little to be the mother of the 
tall young daughter who was so like her father. 

There was a ruddy-faced, elderly man there whom we 
admired immensely, because of his extreme horsiness. He 
lived in riding-dress till dinner-time, and had more buckles 
and straps about his legs than any man I ever saw. He 
told us a ghost-story or an apparition-story after dinner, 
looking rather shy over it. He had had an assignation with 
a young woman in his youth, which — *'not to deceive you," 
he said with a blush — was unknown to her parents. They 
were to meet in a little London square. He waited for her 
and saw her come — he mentioned incidentally that the dress 
of the day which she was wearing was a cottage bonnet, 
the front filled in with roses, a small crinoline under a 
voluminous skirt, her shoulders draped with a scarf. She 
came walking along the pathway towards him. He flew 
to meet her. She was not there. ''She was fifty miles 

[ 340 ] 



1889 

away," he said : "her parents had prevented her coming 
at the last moment." 

I remember the beds of great poppies by the garden-wall, 
the Arab tent in which "the Squire," as his neighbours called 
Mr. Blunt, used to sleep, the tethered horse grazing quietly 
close by, the Arab spear by the flap of the tent, as though 
around spread the desert instead of dear leafy Sussex. 

In the house there were Byron relics everywhere, pic- 
tures, portraits, a cast of his hand, delicately feminine. 
Crabbet in that July was in strange contrast to Galway Jail, 
where Mr. Blunt had, not long before, spent three months 
in vindication of the rights of free speech. 

I admired Mr. Blunt immensely, but I was in love with 
Lady Anne. She looked so good, so much of the open air, 
so wholesome, so simple. 

After that visit I went back to Oxford to finish my visits. 
One of these Sunday mornings at St. Aloysius's I heard the 
prayers of the congregation asked for the repose of the soul 
of Father Gerard Hopkins, my first intimation of his illness, 
of his death. 

After Oxford I was back again in London. On Tuesday, 
the 2nd of July. I went to a garden-party at Mrs. Mona 
Caird's. Mrs. Caird was one of the sensations of that year, 
having set on foot the Daily Telegraph discussion for the 
Silly Season, "Is Marriage a Failure?" As a sensation the 
topic had a succes fou. Mrs. Caird spoke for the Ayes, and 
wrote one or two novels to press home her point. She was 
a very agreeable surprise to those who met her. She was 
a pretty young woman, with a look of honest sunburn about 
her, and very true, gentle brown eyes, and she dressed 
charmingly. That year we were all wearing streamers to 
pur hats, and I have a vivid memory of her green ribbons, 
going well with the browns of her face and eyes and hair. 

[341] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

I think she was dissatisfied with marriage vicariously : 
someone, a sister perhaps, had made an unfortunate mar- 
riage. Her own, I am sure, was happy enough. Her hus- 
band was a most unassertive person, who was present at 
his wife's parties, but was unrecognised by nine out of ten 
people as their host. 

At that special party I enjoyed myself very much, talk- 
.ing to Mr. H. D. Traill^ for whom I was to write later 
when he controlled Literature, and Mr. Sydney Hall, the 
black and white artist. It seemed to touch Mr. Traill's sense 
of humour that I should have been staying at the house of 
the Chinese professor at Oxford. I remember that we 
laughed a good deal, irresponsibly, as though my two com- 
panions were boys instead of mature men. 

There came trailing to us across the grass Miss Emily 
Hickey, the founder of the Browning Society and herself a 
poet of achievement, in a wonderful Liberty garment of pale 
green, one of those beautiful aesthetic dresses which in that 
dead and, gone year made vivid splashes of colour in the 
West End streets of London. We could not have fore- 
casted then the day in the far future when Miss Hickey 
should become a fervent daughter of the Catholic Church, 
devoted to its service and dressing as nun-like as might be. 

Presently I was visiting the Yeatses at Bedford Park; 
and find many interesting names in my diary. "May 
Morris and Halliday Sparling here." "Home of the Hobby 
Horse here." The Hobby Horse was the precursor of a 
number of periodicals produced for pure delight, wonder-^ 
ful pictures, beautiful printing, aesthetic prose and poetry: 
paying no one but delighting many. There is no room for 
such a thing in our jog-trot days. On a Sunday evening, 
'Went to a Socialist lecture at Morris's." That morning 
I had found my way to the little Catholic church at Turn- 

[ 342 ] 




Lord Raxdolph Churchill 



Maude CIonne 



1889 

ham Green. "Is that the Catholic church?" I asked a lady 
who was going the same way as I was. "Yes, thank God!" 
she said. It reminded me that I was in a country where 
the minority is very fervent. 

On Wednesday, loth July, I was at a party given by the 
William Sharps in honour of Mrs. Atherton, who was just 
heard of at that time. I remember that she was all in white, 
but I do not remember that we spoke. I was quite satisfied, 
for I talked with Thomas Hardy. I remember him stand- 
ing, with his peculiar air of modesty, his head down-bent, 
while I told him that every good thing that happened to 
me brought joy to my father in Ireland, and that the story 
of my having met him would be a great joy. 

Unfortunately for me all those letters to my father which 
told of my great events to the least detail are missing. He 
used to keep them in his safe, but they were less precious 
to others when he was gone. 

Frederick Wedmore, too, I talked with that day and Amy 
Levy again. I find a mem. in my diary, "Sunday 21st. 
Amy Levy. 4.30. At home Wednesdays." Perhaps that 
indicated a meeting which did not come off. By Sunday 
the 2ist there was a visitor to London who distracted me 
for a time from all my distractions. 

On Friday the 12th I was at the Parnell Commission, 
and watched from the gallery Sir Frank Lockwood mak- 
ing sketches and handing them about. The interest of the 
proceedings must have been thin, for I remember nothing 
at all about them. Mrs. Alexander Sullivan was present 
and gave us lunch at her hotel, an uninteresting lunch and a 
disappointing one, for some silver-foiled bottles which I 
thought to be sparkling wine — I liked sparkling wine in 
those days because it was festive — turned out to be only 
Salutaris. 

[343] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

We went to tea at Home's of the Hobby Horse, where 
was Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, of whom I saw a good 
deal that summer. On the Saturday following I took a 
specially conducted party of Americans, of which Mrs. 
Alexander Sullivan was one, to Oxford; another, destined 
to be a life-long friend of mine, was Miss Louise Imogen 
Guiney, a delightfully frank, fresh, and boyish girl, who 
was writing the best poetry of her day in America. 

On the 17th of July I went for the first time to the sale 
of Arabs, and the garden party following, at Crabbet Park. 
This for many years was one of the events of the London 
season. At Three Bridges station it was raining. There 
were many brakes and open carriages of all sorts to carry 
up the guests and buyers to Crabbet: only one closed car- 
riage. As I stood in the station doorway looking out at 
the fast-falling rain, unwilling to expose my finery in an 
open brake, I suddenly saw Sir Charles Russell. I stood 
so much in awe of him that my inclination was always to 
keep in the background; but he never failed to recognise 
me. I suppose he recognised everyone he had met. You 
had a feeling of those eyes singling you out in a crowd. 
Impossible to elude or escape them. 

I made for a brake with my companion. Sir Charles 
stopped me. "You can't go in that; you will be wet." He 
opened the door of the brougham. Within sat Lady Went- 
worth, Lady Anne Blunt's sister-in-law, a very proud- 
looking lady. Miss (Lady Mary?) Milbanke, whom I had 
met at Crabbet previously, and Lady Wentworth's maid 
sitting with her lady's jewel-case on her knee. 

"Come out and sit on the box," said Sir Charles to the 
maid. I trembled. I would a thousand times rather have 
braved the rain than Lady Wentworth's obvious displeasure. 
"Come out and sit on the box." The maid, who had hesi- 

[344] 



1889 

tated, looking at her mistress, came out in answer to that 
imperious summons, and Sir Charles handed me in. An- 
other lady followed, and he banged the door. 

We drove up in the most chilly silence. At Crabbet it 
was still raining. While the men and the horsey ladies went 
round the stables, we, who had our fine frocks on, sat in the 
drawing-room. Not a word was said. The stiffness was 
such as to make one want to jump up and break something 
in order to create a diversion. 

At the worst moment a very vivacious-looking little lady 
suddenly crossed over to me. "Can't we talk?" she asked, 
with just a touch of American accent. I was flattered at 
her selecting me. She was Mrs. — afterwards Lady — Evans, 
the wife of Mr. — afterwards Sir Frank — Evans, who was 
then member for Southampton. 

Together, as soon as the rain lifted, we went out and 
saw the stables. Mrs. Evans wanted a horse. We delighted 
in the horsey ladies, with the slightly husky, flat voices, 
dressed in tailor-mades, who went round taking the horses' 
feet into their hands and examining them, and doing other 
strange things. 

I will not speak for the sale that day. I wrote a very 
detailed account of it for an American newspaper ; but while 
it was in progress I was in a boat on the lake, and narrowly 
escaped being caught fast in the roots of water-lilies and 
having to wait for rescue. 

Oscar Wilde was one of the prominent figures of that 
day, affable as ever, with his large, fat face, and the heavy 
hair. There also was the first of the two Pamelas. I 
brought up Oscar Wilde to her. She was curious about 
him. Poor, pretty little Mrs. Oscar was there also. So 
was Miss Jane Cobden, nobly handsome. There was Mrs. 
William Morris, wonderfully dressed, trailing a long, shim- 

[345] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

mering garment across the grass. There were — oh, all man- 
ner of people, for everybody who was anybody in London 
went in those days to Crabbet for the sale of Arabs. 

The next day I went to the Meistersinger at Covent 
Garden with Mrs. Martin, a cousin of Lady Young's, with 
whom I had formed a friendship. Wagner was then com- 
paratively new to London, and there were tremendous 
crowds. We were only able to book seats in the gallery, 
where we were surrounded by German clerks and their 
wives, each couple with their score following the opera in 
an impassioned absorption. I was delighted with my ex- 
perience. Our neighbours were most kind, courteous, and 
pleasant, coming out of their absorption to explain to the 
ignorant stranger about the motif and other things. I have 
never seen, not even in church, a more rapt audience. They 
seemed spell-bound, listening motionlessly till something in 
the music sent a low sigh of rapture through them, and they 
trembled as a cornfield trembles when the wind blows over 
it. In the interval everyone adjourned to the most decorous 
of refreshment-counters, where coffee and light beer were 
much in demand. It was not easy to realise that one was 
in London and not in a German city. 

While I stayed with the Yeatses at Bedford Park one 
of the many interesting people I met with was Nettleship, 
the animal painter, whom I liked as much as I liked his 
pictures. He was perpetually painting the animals at the 
Zoo, and while he was very eager, I thought I saw in him 
something of the repose of the great felines he was always 
studying. I remember going to see him in Wimpole Street 
with W. B. Yeats; but in the strange way that memory 
uses us, losing us the important things, leaving us the un- 
important, I can remember of that visit only the look of 
Wimpole Street on a summer evening, the closed shops, 

[346] 



1889 

the air of dead-alive dustiness. T can remember standing, 
having knocked at the door, awaiting its opening. Then — 
the slate is clean. All that would have been in my letters 
to my father, my one eager listener, if only they had been 
preserved. 

On Monday, 22nd July, I visited another poet. Miss May 
Probyn, who was a great invalid. On Wednesday I went 
down to Norfolk to the Fagans. 

When I look back on that visit the one outstanding per- 
son is — Jim Alderson. He was reading for the army with 
Mr. Fagan, a lean, freckled, clear-eyed boy, honest as 
the day. At first he doubted me. He was very English 
and very loyal. He looked on me as an Irish rebel, and 
he had had a lot to put up with in Mr. Pagan's unreason- 
ing Irishism. But very soon we became friends. I came 
to have a great affection for Jim Alderson, as he had for 
me. In a somewhat darkened atmosphere he was the light 
of the house. His joyous heart never failed for an instant, 
and he had young, rollicking, boyish ways. He was as 
loyal as a puppy and as good. How we laughed ! And how 
he did things for me! And how kind and grieved he was 
when I was frightened by a thunderstorm! And how he 
watched over me ! 

Ah, well — we were young in spite of everything — play- 
ing ecarte together of evenings, going for drives with a 
village pony, which at times used to pasture by the side 
of the road and refuse to budge till he thought he would. 
Jim Alderson would pretend to whack him, and sing ridicu- 
lous songs at the top of his young cracked voice, and make 
preposterous jests, while we laughed as though we were 
mad. 

How indignant he was when a malevolent lady at a 
garden-party put it about that I was the daughter of 

[347] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

"No, i" Tynan, who was supposed to be connected with 
the Invincibles! How he set out to scotch that calumny, 
and was stern with the lady like a young accusing spirit! 

We used to correspond, and he came later to see me at 
the Meynells, and we went to the Spanish Exhibition to- 
gether, and dined in a restaurant and had high jinks. 

I wish I had kept his innocent letters. To the last he 
spelt Dublin "Doublin,'' and as a superfluity of naughti- 
ness he always spelt goddess with a single "d." He scraped 
into the Army, was in the Royal Irish, went to India with 
his regiment, and in saving his colonel's life had his own 
arm clawed by a tigress — the muscle torn clean out of it. 
After I was married he came to see me, not the awkward 
boy in shabby homespuns I remembered, but a slight, rather 
elegant young man, wearing extremely well-cut clothes, 
very lean still : with the honest, clean eyes I remembered. 
There were two visits home, the first immediately after I 
was married : the second, some four years later, we saw 
a good deal of him; he had been clawed by the tiger, and 
was in the hands of doctors, masseurs, &c., all trying to 
save his sword-arm and failing to get much sensation into it. 

The South African War gave him his chance. They 
did not ask too many questions about the sword-arm. He 
went to the front, fought unscathed through that blackest 
of black winters, in the following July was shot by a party 
of Boers, with whom he had sat up the preceding night in 
friendly converse. He was sent down to the camps, riddled 
with bullets and suffering terribly on the journey — I am 
sure without a complaint. He died of his wounds a few 
hours after he had arrived. 

"Heart too full of heavenly haste, too like the bubble bright, 
On loud little water floating half of an April night, 
Gone from the ear in music, gone from the eye in light." 

[ 348 ] 



1889 

Here is what I wrote about him in the Pall Mall Gazette, 
an instant appreciation, which must have some freshness the 
dust-choked years have lost : 

A SOLDIER 

(James Beauchamp Stanley Alderson) 

Bethlehem, July ^th, 1900 

On another July Sunday, ten years ago, they gathered 
field flowers in a Norfolk lane. To remember it now makes 
her old and dreary, though she has justified her life by 
work and wifehood and maternity; and the mother of chil- 
dren need never be old. He was a lean boy then, lean as 
a hound, long and freckled, with a wholesome brown face 
and honest eyes. Circumstances, unhappy in one way, 
threw them together in an unusual intimacy for some weeks 
of time. They had hardly any secrets from each other, 
the boy of twenty and the woman some years his senior, 
and theirs was a pure friendship, a friendship which was 
only conscious of sex through the boy's tender chivalry 
towards a dear woman and the woman's pleasure in the 
feeling she had awakened. He had just then put on his 
sword, a sword which has always seemed to her an emblem 
of his swift, bright readiness to serve and to save a woman 
if that were needed. For some five or six happy weeks of 
time, the woman, older, cleverer, had the boy's soul under 
her eyes. Every thought of the frank and simple nature 
was laid bare to her. There was nothing she might not 
see. In a turgid and troubled atmosphere his simplicity 
and his tenderness made him a light in dark places. For 
all that simplicity his nature had depths, untroubled depths, 
of devotion, selflessness, self-sacrifice, and belief. He was 
perfectly joyous, while capable of suffering indignation and 
pity. He was far from being intellectual; his spelling was 

[349] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the despair of examiners, and to the day he died he wrote 
like a schoolboy ; but all the same the woman met him upon 
heights, hills of nobility and innocence, to which he cer- 
tainly was not the climber. Amid the dreams and shadows 
of her maidenhood she had premonitions of how his mother 
must love him, must feel her heart swell with pride and 
joy for the man-child she had brought into the world. He 
was a soldier by right; one could imagine no other career 
for him. His patriotism was a passion, if one can speak 
of passion where there was no tumult, for every motion 
in him was pure and fresh as a mountain rill, though that, 
too, has its torrents. 

"What have I done for you, 
England, my England?" 

he would have cried, with the poet, if he had known any- 
thing of poetry, as he did not, except to live it uncon- 
sciously. His nearest approach to an appreciation of verse 
was his joy in a rollicking, somewhat foolish comic song, 
shouted out in a young, untuneful, dear voice, with such 
enjoyment to himself that one must enjoy it too. Despite 
his unletteredness, so to speak, the woman never mistook 
him for an instant, never doubted that she was face to face 
with an elect soul, which yet gave her assurance that such 
election was far from uncommon among the class to which 
he belonged. He would indeed have been the first to resent 
being set apart from his fellows if he could have imagined 
such a thing. Nor did he deserve so melancholy a distinc- 
tion ; for he was human all through as befitted so masculine 
a creature, not exempt from the temptations and falls of 
the natural man, but somehow beautiful and bright through 
that saving salt of gentlehood. She used to think that in 
deadly peril she would choose to have him by her side. She 

[350] 



1889 

imagined impossible situations in which he would realise 
the most exquisite ideals of protection and selflessness. He 
was clean as his sword and as bright; though, after all, he 
was only a lean, sunburnt boy, full of laughter the wise 
might have called foolish; prejudiced as only his country- 
people can be; with a little horizon, though a clear one; 
almost plain-looking in his shabby suit of country home- 
spuns, if it were not for that indefinable something of dis- 
tinction, of breeding, which marked him as gentle. After 
years of absence, when he came home a man of thirty from 
India, she pointed him out to an acute student of men and 
character. "Look at him," she said; "he would do what 
Sidney has been vaunted for all these centuries — that is, 
deny himself the draught of water that one of his Tommies 
might have it; and it would never occur to him that there 
was anything remarkable about it." "I can believe it," 
said the expert, looking at the lean face bronzed by the 
Indian suns. "And there must be many like him," she 
went on. For that is the happy faith he has left her. There 
are affections that depend on the nearness of the object. 
Indeed, few of our affections can stand a long separation. 
But this was one neither time nor tide could alter, nor even 
the separation of the grave. "His very memory is fair 
and bright," and will be so long as she lives. She knows 
nothing of how he died, though she never doubts that it 
was heroically. Certainly he would not grudge his own 
life, bitterly as she does, nor think it intolerable that he 
should be sacrificed in a little skirmish at the end of a war 
of which the interest is spent. If it had been in a crusading 
war! There he had been in his rightful place, for in his 
simple way he was religious, though he would have been 
dreadfully ashamed to talk about it ; and to the last he said 
the prayers learned at his mother's knee. But she is sure 

[351] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

that he went to his death as becomes a soldier — without 
regret, without misgiving, joyously, as he had lived. He 
should have made some woman perfectly happy, and given 
sons like himself to the country he adored. Or so it seems 
to the woman on this side of their friendship, who thinks 
of his mother and wishes her own sons might be like him. 
But as for him, he was always ready, and took as merrily 
as though it were a lads' friendly wrestling bout the hard 
buffets dealt him by Fortune, who, relenting at last, gave 
him his company on the edge of the grave. And, after all, 
there is a fitness in thinking of him in that eternal boyhood 
which death has conferred on him. The gravities, the fears 
of husband and fatherhood, were not for him. Amid bitter, 
bitter tears for a world suddenly emptied of him, and the 
desolation one imagines in the heart of her who bore him, 
one can still say with humble and perfect realisation : 

"Dear and stainless heart of a boy ! no sweeter thing may be 
Drawn to the quiet centre of God who is our sea; 
Whither through troubled valleys we also follow thee." 



I 352 J 



CHAPTER XXIX 

1889-90 

After Norfolk I went to Cambridge to stay with Mrs. 
Bateson, the widow of the Master of John's, a very ardent 
Home Ruler. I lunched with the Lytteltons at Selwyn, 
where were some dons, including A. W. Verrall, tea'd with 
Miss Clough at Newnham, and was introduced to Miss 
Helen Gladstone. Another day I visited Girton and other 
colleges, dined at Jesus, tea'd at Sidney Sussex — doing very 
well for a flying visit in the "Long." 

I went back then to the Meynells and stayed for a month 
with them before going home. It was just the time of the 
great dock strike, and on Sunday the ist of September 
there was a mass meeting in the Park. I had the hardi- 
hood to go into the crowd, with Wilfred Meynell and 
Vernon Blackburn. We got quite close to the platform from 
which John Burns was speaking. He was at that time the 
idol of the populace. I liked him and was impressed with 
a sense of his honesty. When it came to taking a collec- 
tion I handed up my parasol open to John Burns, starting 
the collection with a couple of half-crowns. There was 
great laughter and excitement as the open parasol was 
passed about among the crowd, coins raining into it. When 
it was handed up to John Burns it was quite full and had 
to make a second journey. After that we were invited to 
a seat on the platform, and I was helped up by Mr. Cun- 
ninghame Graham, with all the courtesy of the Spanish 
Don he looked like. We had a long talk with him after- 
wards, without saying anything about who we were. That 

[353] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

was the first and last time I was cheered by an Enghsh 
crowd. 

The following day I spent at the docks; saw the men 
standing idle about the dockyard gates, and heard many 
tales of misery. 

Another day we — Alice Meynell and I, accompanied by a 
Yeats girl — went to Tilbury and lunched on the schooner 
Clara of Sligo, which belonged to the Polloxfens of Sligo, 
Mrs. J. B. Yeats' s family. The Clara was lying up in dock 
unable to get out, and we had a real sea-faring lunch, all 
sorts of tinned things being brought out from the lockers 
for us. It was a surprise lunch, but we were treated with 
the utmost hospitality, and Captain Polloxfen and the mate, 
Mr. Quinn, made excellent hosts. Tilbury Docks was a 
howling wilderness that day. 

One morning in September I went with Wilfred Meynell 
to see Cardinal Manning. It was a beautiful morning. I 
think it must have been on that occasion that I omitted 
out of sheer nervousness to kiss his ring, with the usual 
curtsey. But no: I think it must have been earlier in the 
summer, though I have no record of it. It seems to me 
that I must have seen him thrice that summer and never 
again. On the occasion of the first visit, when I behaved 
in a stiff-kneed, heretical manner, I was covered with con- 
fusion at my own unreadiness. I was young enough then 
to feel such things acutely. V/ilfred Meynell seemed to 
have observed nothing, for which I was deeply grateful: 
but that evening, when Mr. J. G. Snead Cox and some 
other people were at dinner with us, Wilfred suddenly said 
across the table, "By the way, Cox, K. T." (as I am to 
my intimates), "when the Cardinal gave her his ring to 
kiss, behaved exactly as you did with Monsignor Ruffo 
Scilla, and gave him a hearty British handshake." 

[ 354 ] 




William Morris 



1889-90 

On my second visit, when I behaved quite properly, the 
Cardinal remarked, "You were very stiff the last time you 
came to see me." 

That same day we visited Lady Colin Campbell, who was 
a neighbour of the Cardinal's. She looked very beautiful 
and sleek, like Cleopatra in her barge, as she reclined amid 
heaps of gaily-coloured silk cushions, smoking a cigarette. 
She told us that she had been to see the Cardinal, and that 
he had given her one of his books, adding as an after- 
thought: "But you won't read it." "O yes, your Emi-* 
nence, I shall. I always read when my maid is brushing 
my hair, and I shall certainly read it then." 

I paid my last visit to the Cardinal just before I left for 
home at the end of September. The visit was made in 
the early forenoon, and as we walked along from Victoria 
Station the newsboys were shouting the latest Jack-the- 
Ripper murder. We were the first to carry the intelligence 
to the Cardinal, who received us in the little inner room 
off his big room, where he sat by the fire wearing his warm 
quilted overcoat. I suppose there was an autumnal nip in 
the air, though I did not feel it. He looked very old and 
frail as he sat there; and now and again he hummed to 
himself in a way which spoke painfully of old age. I dare 
say the business of the dock strike had wearied him, for 
he looked a very tired old saint that day. When Wilfred 
Meynell told him of the murder he closed his eyes and 
the strangest look came into his face, "careful for a whole 
world of sin and pain." He gave me his little book, 
Towards Evening, as he said good-bye to me for the last 
time. 

Wilfred Meynell was always playing tricks on me in 
those days. I had told him a story I had heard somewhere 
of the Cardinal's old servant — oddly enough, named New- 

[ 355 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

man — of how, in the very early days, when a Cardinal was 
stranger in England than a white blackbird, a London 'bus- 
load of passengers had a bet upon it as to whether or not 
the little man they saw passing in and out of the Cardinal's 
house was the Cardinal himself. Finally the matter was 
referred to Newman, who was reported to have said, "Look 
'ere, you blokes ! If you come a-kiddin' me I'll jolly well 
punch your *eads for you,'' or something of the kind. 

What was my horror when Wilfred Meynell told this 
absurd story to old Newman, who really understudied the 
Cardinal in the way of dignity. He pretended to take the 
old fellow's side against me, saying, "It's an absurd cock- 
and-bull story, of course. But this lady is responsible for 
it. She brought it from Dublin, where they are always 
starting these absurd stories, and everyone believes it." Old 
Newman was extremely annoyed. 

I must have been rather a joy in those days, for I was 
quite angry when Wilfred set out to demonstrate to me 
that the Jack-the-Ripper murders were the work of an Irish- 
man. On a later occasion, when I had come back to Palace 
Court from one of my absences in the country, and had 
been followed into the house by a particularly dreadful 
specimen of the cab-runner, that heartbreaking creature of 
the London streets, who, thank God, has disappeared with 
the arrival of the taxi-cab, Wilfred Meynell leant over the 
stairs calling out affectionate welcomes to me, but adding 
softly between his adjectives to the cab-runner to go away, 
"Still, K. T. dear, why bring your Irish patriots with you?" 
By that time, however, I knew his freakish humour and did 
not rise. 

Another day in that September I went down and had tea 
with May Morris in the garden of Kelmscott House, where 
she sat under a big mulberry tree in the old garden which 

[356] 



1889-90 

was rapidly being built In. George Bernard Shaw's mother 
joined us at tea. Like her son, she was very witty, very 
satirical, and yet neither wit nor satire left anything pain- 
ful behind. You were amused : you laughed when the 
rapier flashed in your eyes : afterwards you felt it was sword- 
play, with neither intention nor desire to wound. I re- 
member that she expressed strong Irish Protestant senti- 
ments, which were perhaps hardly well-founded. The meet- 
ing brought me back five years to the first time I saw and 
heard Bernard Shaw at a meeting of the Browning So- 
ciety, when my neighbour whispered to me that he was 
very brilliant and had a great future. I can only remember 
that he discussed "Caliban upon Setebos," and his remark- 
ing that if Caliban was now alive he would belong to the 
Philharmonic Society. 

I was tremendously interested in Morris's house, the 
dining-room, looking as far as possible like a beautiful 
kitchen, with its plain white wood dresser, covered with 
blue china : the drawing-room with the hooded fire-place 
and settles, the Rossettis, the Burne-Joneses on the wall. 
I had already met Morris himself in Dublin, and had 
amused and pleased him by knowing by heart the "Sailing 
of the Sword" and others of his earlier poems (which I 
had by heart from reading them in the bound volumes of 
magazines which afforded me such rich reading in my fal- 
low years), and asking him to clear up knotty points con- 
cerning them. 

One of those September days Mivart lunched with the 
Meynells. Some of the conversation turned on the prob- 
able successor of Cardinal Manning. I do not think that 
Mivart was anxious for a successor from Salford. He 
impressed me with a sense of being an advanced and liberal 

[357] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

thinker. At that time we Catholics were very proud of 
Mivart, and it was an event to me to meet him. 

The autumn of that year has nothing very much to re- 
cord. I saw my friends constantly, and I had a grief in 
the death of Ellen O'Leary. I had a second, but I did 
not know how great a grief, in Rose Kavanagh's going 
to winter in the South of France. I came back just in time 
to see her before I went, and to tell her all I had to tell. 
You could always empty your heart to Rose. As a matter 
of fact I was never to see her again. It was a cruel winter 
in the South that year, the pine-forests about Arcachon 
heaped with snow that lay on Rose's window-sill and blot- 
ted out the sky. She wrote to me several times. I have 
only one letter, dated the 2nd of December, full of home- 
sickness. She came back only too glad to come home to 
die, and she never left her own Tyrone again. She had 
been everything to me a friend could be — a great soul, yet 
a very human one, unlike some other lofty souls I have 
known, who were too high for common folk. 

1890 brought additional work and friends. Early in the 
year came a commission from the Loretto nuns to write a 
life of one of their members, which I did, and received for 
it the sum of £50 — a huge sum, it seemed to me then. When 
I received it I had a great mind to put It Into Pneumatic 
Tyres, which had not then begun to boom, but I was dis- 
suaded. I should have been quite a rich woman if I had 
followed up my intention. 

Long before that time I had started a Post Office Savings 
Bank account, but I am afraid that very soon my thriftiness 
deserted me, for I rapidly drew out what I had put in, leav- 
ing only 13.9. gd. to my account, a sum which plagued the 
Post-Office people for some years. That reminds me of 
an occasion when I received 2s. ^d. from an American pub- 

[358] 



1889-90 

lisher as royalties on a book. I was so incensed at the con- 
temptibleness of the sum that I flung the letter and the 
check (it deserves the American spelling) into a drawer, 
vowing that I never would demean myself so far as to cash 
it. For some years I received by-yearly an anguished en- 
treaty from the cashier of that American firm begging me 
to cash the "check/' since he could not get his accounts 
straight without it. At last I wrote to him telling him 
to devote the sum to any good work he was interested 
in, as I never would stoop to deposit such a thing at my 
bank. About a year later I had occasion to pay a small 
sum to an American press-cutting agency, and remembering 
the despised "check" I looked for it, found it, and sent it 
in part payment. I have from time to time since then con- 
sidered what remarks that American cashier may have made 
respecting me. 

Before setting to work at the Nun's life I went down to 
see New Ross, Kilkenny and Waterford, being commis- 
sioned to write round these ancient Anglo-Norman towns 
for a magazine. An adventure of mine afforded my friends 
some amusement when I told them of it, so I tell it again 
here, hoping it may amuse a larger circle. 

It was at Kilkenny it happened. I was staying in one of 
those big barrack-like hotels, which you will often find in 
Irish country towns, speaking eloquently of splendid days 
gone by. I was all by myself and I was lonesome : a little 
nervy perhaps from seeing many churches and churchyards, 
and desperately afraid of a strange bedroom. 

There was not a soul staying in the house beyond my- 
self and a whole army of "Commercials." I had spent a 
dispirited evening in the vast drawing-room alone, and when 
I went up to bed I was in a thoroughly nervy condition. 
My bedroom was as big as a church, and there was a bed 

[ 359 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

like a catafalque for me to sleep in. Terrible shadows lurked 
behind the big articles of furniture, ran away from me as 
I came with my solitary candle, and mowed and mopped as 
they fled into corners, I was thoroughly frightened. When 
I got into bed I sat up looking to the distant parts of the 
room, which were like Darkest Africa, and wondering how 
I was to get through the night. 

Suddenly I remembered — it was like a message from 
Heaven — I had noticed outside my door a full score of 
tall candles in candlesticks, with a box of matches set con- 
veniently. Heavens, what a deliverance! I vow that I 
never dreamt of a connection between those candles and 
the simple-minded Commercials down there in the bar. I 
only saw that I was saved. 

I stole out soft-footed. The gas on the stairs had already 
been turned out. I had stayed up late, with a hope of being 
so sleepy that I must sleep. I carried in the candles in re- 
lays, every one, took the box of matches too by way of 
precaution, and felt that I was saved : a couple of lit candles 
on the dressing-table, one by my bed, would keep the shad- 
ows at bay. I could count on my own nerviness to wake me 
up before the candles needed renewal. I lay down and slept 
in a splendid illumination. 

Midway of my first sleep I was awakened by a hurly-burly 
outside my door. People were falling over things : there 
was language ; shouts for Pat the Boots : a door slammed 
downstairs. "Bad luck to the blackguard !" said someone. 
"He's gone to bed and he's left us in the dark. The divil 
a candle's in it, nor a match either." 

Well, I was alarmed when I realised my nefarious deed, 
but there was no going back. And I simply hugged my 
lighted room. I sat up in bed and partook of light refresh- 
ments while the Commercials outside my door fell over 

[360] 



1889-90 

more obstacles than I could have thought possible, and used 
such language that I really had to stick my fingers in 
my ears. 

I had a glorious night, only broken by changing the 
candles three or four times. Early in the morning, when 
the blessed sun sent a long shaft through my window-blinds, 
I got up and stealing out very softly restored the burnt- 
out or partly burnt candles, with the box of matches, to 
their place on the table. Then I slept again. 

Again I was awakened by a hurly-burly. There was a 
chorus of excited voices. I thought I heard a boot thrown. 
Then came Pat the Boots's voice, more in sorrow than in 
anger. 

"Gintlemen, gintlemen," he said, "ye wor drunk last 
night. Didn't I hear yez makin' a bastely row an' me goin' 
to me well-earned rest? I'm ashamed of ye, gintlemen, so 
I am. Whatever devilment were yez up to at all?" — in a 
more sprightly voice. "No candles, indeed ! Will yez come 
an' look for yourselves? There's not a candle missin', an' 
yez used them too, for they're burnt out, the half o' them. 
Och, gintlemen, gintlemen ! Yez must have been very bad 
entirely." 

I left the hotel after breakfast that morning, and heard 
as I passed through the hall Pat the Boots telling the bar- 
maid of the tricks of the "playboys" upstairs. 

That spring I also made an expedition with Miss Mul- 
holland to see New Tipperary, which was then just spring- 
ing up on the ruins of Mrs. Hurley's garden. Mrs. Hurley 
was the wife of one of the leading merchants in Tipperary, 
then a very prosperous inland town. We stayed at Dobbyn's 
Hotel and heard the night-watchman going his rounds. 
"Half-past twelve o'clock and a fine morning." He told 
the hour and the weather through the night. Tipperary 

[361] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

stuck to its Town Watch, long after the quaint institution 
had been superseded elsewhere. We had gone down ready 
to be enthusiastic, having heard much of the willing sacri- 
fice of the people of Tipperary Town, who were fighting 
not for themselves but for others against the tyranny of 
the landlord, Mr. Smith Barry. As a matter of fact we 
found something disquieting in the atmosphere. We were 
most hospitably received and entertained by priests and 
people. There was a certain amount of fine talk, but there 
was something else in the air: Mrs. Hurley wiped away 
a tear when she talked of her garden : there was an anxiety, 
a shadow. The old, wise priest, Canon Cahill, could not 
be drawn into enthusiasm. Some of the younger priests, 
taking us to see the Glen of Aherlow, whispered their fore- 
bodings. 

I came the other day upon a card of invitation to the 
opening of New Tipperary, to be inaugurated, of course, by 
a banquet. The Irish could do nothing in those days with- 
out a banquet. 

Of course everyone knows that New Tipperary ended 
in what a Lord Mayor of Dublin once called "chowse." 
The great "Mart" was a terrible failure and fiasco. The 
people who suffered most were the loyal merchants and shop- 
keepers of Tipperary — I mean loyal to the National Cause. 
They suffered, and I think they knew all through they 
were going to suffer. They used to say in the years follow- 
ing that Tipperary could never again return to its old pros- 
perity, that the great folly had completely ruined it. I hope, 
however, that those who said so were wrong. I was greatly 
impressed by the Hurleys, the O'Brien Dal tons, and the 
other loyal people who had to suffer for New Tipperary. 
By the end of the year we were standing shoulder to 
shoulder by Mr. Parnell. I could have been sure of them, 

[362] 



1889-90 

beforehand. I pray that there may be many like them in 
Ireland to-day. When you can find a good Tipperary man 
— or woman — you can stake your life on him or her. 

That year, too, I find a mention here and there in my diary 
of Miss Gonne. I first saw her at a meeting of the 
Protestant Home Rule Association, to which she was ac- 
companied by a Miss Ida Pim. Her extraordinary beauty 
drew all eyes to her. She was the most beautiful woman 
I have ever seen, and in keeping with her beauty was an 
exquisite voice. She dressed beautifully as well, and in 
Dublin, where taste in dress is not a strong point, her dress 
made her as conspicuous as her beauty. When one met 
her walking in a Dublin street one felt as if a goddess had 
come to earth. 

She was staying at that time at a Dublin hotel, where 
she entertained her friends hospitably. I have always been 
sorry that the accident of a letter remaining unposted, 
through the carelessness of the person to whom it was en- 
trusted, should have prevented my being of her friends. 

Her strange and winning beauty, together with her aloof- 
ness from all things unconcerned with the absorbing inter- 
est of her life, made her many enemies. Personally I have 
never had any doubt that she saw only one thing, that she 
was absorbed by an enthusiasm so passionate and sincere 
that nothing else mattered to her. For men, or women, 
she had no use at all, as men or women. They were so 
many pawns in the revolutionary game. At first every man 
on whom she looked was in love with her — such women, 
too, as she was gracious to, who were above jealousy. I 
remember when the heads of all my male friends, young 
and old, were flustered by her beauty and grace. But they 
soon got over it. I have always held that love must have 
something to live upon, something of invitation if not of 

[ 363 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

response. Her aloofness must have chilled the most ardent 
lover. 

We were still timidly conventional in Dublin of that day. 
The middle-class conventions held us in check. No woman 
who was not very emancipated drove on an outside car 
unaccompanied by a male escort. Miss Gonne drove on a 
car quite alone, with only her bulldog for escort. That in 
itself made Dublin look askance at her. In Dublin the 
middle-class, a far narrower class, is as dominant and pre- 
dominant as in England. The bulldog went everywhere 
with her. He followed her once majestically into the dining- 
room of the Westminster Palace Hotel, where she sat at 
a table at which were a couple of Irish patriots. She was 
absorbed in conversation when a waiter came and stood 
respectfully waiting to speak. At last she looked up. Some 
people in the dining-room had objected to the presence of 
Madam's bulldog. The manager was very sorry, but . . . 
"Remove him," said Miss Gonne, with the slightest pause 
in the conversation. The waiter looked at the bulldog, and 
like a prudent man, departed. Presently came the manager. 
"Would Madam be good enough to remove her dog? It 
was entirely against the rules," &c., &c. "Remove him," 
said Miss Gonne, proceeding with the conversation. In the 
result the bulldog stayed. 

In the autumn of that year I visited Mr, ParneH's house, 
Avondale, Co. Wicklow. I had been staying with some 
friends, close at hand, and they drove me over one day. 
Looking back, my impressions are of a white, stucco-fronted, 
eighteenth-century house at the head of a glen, pillared, 
porticoed in pseudo-classical style, the stuccoed walls wept 
upon by the green tears of the rain. A dusty hall, with a 
billiard-table, faded and frayed. Dusty rugs. A rusted 
grate. Something of sadness and loneliness over it all. 

[364] 



1889-90 

In an inner room, a library, there was a fire : and it was 
a pleasant room, overlooking the valley of the Avonmore 
river, having bookcases round the walls, behind which 
showed the gilt and tooled backs of the volumes of the 
Transactions of the Irish Parliament. Mr. Parnell's min- 
ing treatises lay in the deep window-seats. He had sunk 
a deal of money in his mining. Every time he had made 
up his mind to throw no more good money after bad theTe 
was a new find of ore and he went on again. It was due 
to him that in that last glorious and terrible year of his 
life he should know at last what it was to receive selfless 
devotion. The man who knows more about Mr. Parnell 
than any other man living, said the other day in my hear- 
ing that at a time when he had on hand two big contracts 
for the supply of paving setts to the corporations of Dub- 
lin and Cardiff the men at the Arklow Quarries struck for 
sevenpence a day increase of wages. "That sevenpence 
represented the profits." Oh, indeed, that Irish leader, like 
many Irish leaders, must have had many an illusion torn 
rudely from his eyes. But, to be sure, as the old man said 
when he came home to find all his people dead, "There are 
always the mountains." 

I wrote to the Speaker about that visit of mine to Avon- 
dale. Looking back, my impression of the house is one of 
almost unrelieved gloom. There was a desolation about it : 
and it was not helped by the fact that the man who was 
showing us over the house had an epileptic seizure in the 
dining-room. 

On the whole, looking back over my brief records of 
that year, I am struck by the extraordinary liberty I en- 
joyed. When my father trusted, he trusted altogether. I 
seem to have been perpetually visiting and being visited 
by my friends, still the friends of the last couple of years 

[ 365 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

■ — Mrs. Gill, the Sigersons, Father Russell, Mr. Ashe King, 
Douglas Hyde, George Russell, W. B. Yeats. It was a 
year of social interests, chiefly, up to the last month of it. 
Despite my incessant junketing, I did a quite amazing 
amount of work. When I was at home I used to go to my 
own little room in the evening about 7, and write till 10 
or 10.30. About that hour, I used to extinguish my lamp 
and grope my way in the darkness through the rooms which 
lay between me and the general sitting-room, where I would 
find my father sitting, smoking and reading while he waited 
for me. If he had gone to bed, I was depressed by the empty 
room : but that only happened when he was over-tired, or 
I had sat unconscionably late. I was always afraid going 
through the dark rooms lest something from behind should 
overtake me. It was correspondingly uplifting, when I had 
fumbled for the last handle and found it, to come out into 
the light and find the quiet figure, which always brought 
me such a rich sense of security, in the lamplit room. He 
would lay down his book, yawn, and say: "Well, love; 
are you done for to-night?" He always called me "love": 
and I was "Kate" to him, as I have never been to any- 
one else. 

When I used to come home from my visits I often found 
him fast asleep in my little room, with my St. Bernard 
stretched out at his feet. The room would be fireless in 
my absence. He would have returned, weary, from fair or 
market, for which he had risen at 4 o'clock. One of my 
poignant memories of his latter days is of hearing him 
called in the dark of the morning, called and called again 
till at last he would shake off the fetters of sleep, and 
rise and go. He had no one to lift his burdens from him 
even when he was old. 

There they would be, the man and the dog who loved 

[366] 



1889-90 

me, happier in the fireless, empty room, because my presence 
yet lingered in it, than elsewhere by a fire. 

Once I came home from an absence of some weeks. I 
had a great pile of correspondence awaiting me. So en- 
grossed was I in it that I never thought to look outside, 
where great improvements had been effected in my absence 
so that when I looked through my window I should see 
masses of flowers. He had told my sisters to say nothing 
about it, so that I should have the joy of the surprise. He 
looked up with eager anticipation when I came down to 
the sitting-room, and his face fell a Httle. I had been think- 
ing only of my letters. I had seen nothing. 



[367] 



CHAPTER XXX 

THE PARNELL SPLIT 

In November of that year came the O'Shea Divorce Case. 
It was no great surprise to anyone who had their ears and 
eyes open. I may state at once how the case stood for us 
who were loyal to Mr. Parnell, as to many others who for 
one or another reason were not loyal to him. There was 
no trail of the sensual over it at all. It appeared to us that 
this great and lonely man had had, for him, the irreparable 
misfortune of falling in love with a woman who was a 
wronged and deserted wife. There was no betrayal of a 
friend, no breaking up of a home : none of the bad features 
that usually accompany such cases. We had a very bad 
opinion of Captain O'Shea. Whatever might or might not 
have been his motive for publishing his wrongs at the elev- 
enth hour, we believed that the story of the fire-escape was 
a malignant invention, sprung upon Mr. Parnell at a mo- 
ment when his lips were sealed, because if collusion was 
proved there would be no divorce and consequently no mar- 
riage with the woman he adored. I state this point of view 
because it will explain how to many devout Catholic Irish- 
women, to whom the sensual sin is the one thing abhorrent, 
the O'Shea Divorce Case was simply not considered at all. 
I will also plead, in justice to those who opposed Mr. 
Parnell — there may have been some honest among them — 
that for a long time Mr. Parnell had almost disappeared 
from the public mind. For one reason or another the reins 
of leadership had hung so slackly that the leader was al- 
most forgotten. He had lost his hold on people. If he 
had died then he would have left comparatively little mark 

[368] 



THE PARNELL SPLIT 

behind. They might have gone on saying, as they were 
saying, that this, that, and the other had done the work 
and not he. It needed that last crowded hour to show him 
as the giant he was. Reading now the comments of the 
Enghsh press at the time of his death I find that he was 
regarded then as a great but somewhat sinister figure — a 
sort of Satan after the Fall, splendid, but better away. The 
haggard desperado invented by Sir F. Carruthers Gould 
who figured on the cover of Mr. T. P. O'Connor's Parnell 
Movement as in the Westminster Gazette, had perhaps 
something to do with this view of him. English people 
thought he looked like Guy Fawkes. Whatever it said 
for Gould's qualities as a caricaturist, it said little for his 
inner imagination. But the judgment that sits behind our 
transient day, sifting, winnowing, casting into the dust or 
keeping, has reversed all that. Steadily, in all the years 
that have gone since his death, I have seen, while the little 
reputations faded away, Mr. ParnelFs greatness grow 
brighter and brighter. It has come to be recognised that 
he was not only a great man of his day, but a great leader 
among the great leaders of history. "When Gladstone is 
a splendid commonplace," I heard Mr. J. L. Garvin say 
once, 'Tarnell will be remembered among the great men of 
the earth." 

In my diary I find no mention at all of events before 
December 2. The Irish members had re-elected Mr. Parnell 
as their chairman : there had been the great meeting at 
The Leinster Hall at which they had pledged themselves to 
stand by him. The American delegates had sent home brave 
words. There was nothing to be excited about. Then 
came Committee Room 15. My father was, I think, away 
at a fair. On Tuesday the 2nd December I find this 
entry : "Spent all the morning reading speeches at Parnell 

[369] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

meeting. Afterwards read them for papa." I remember 
how I read those speeches, under such excitement that I 
had to get up and walk up and down, up and down, to the 
great inconvenience of Pat, my St. Bernard, who occupied 
the hearthrug; and the room was narrow. I could do 
nothing. I was quivering from head to foot with excite- 
ment. I wanted to share my feelings with someone who 
would understand them, and my father was away. When 
he came home I read the speeches to him. Nothing could 
have been more indicative of the excitement in our minds 
than the fact that I was able to read the speeches, that 
reticences were swept away like straws before a flood. 

My father had not yet grasped the situation. "Well, 
Kate," he said, "would it not be as well if he retired for a 
while?" 

"No, it wouldn't," said I, and started out on a passionate 
exposition of the case. In a day or two he was as strong a 
Parnellite as myself. The next day again I was reading 
the speeches and could do nothing else. On Monday the 
8th I wrote to Mr. Parnell, a letter full of passionate loyalty 
doubtless. On Tuesday the 9th I went to town and got 
tickets at the National League for the great meeting at the 
Rotunda the following night. 

On the morning of the loth Mr. Parnell arrived in Dub- 
lin. We were heartened and delighted by his seizure that 
morning of United Ireland, which had gone against him. 
That was the quiet unhistoric seizure. He walked into the 
office of United Ireland with some of his followers, prepared 
for a fight if there was to be a fight. Mr. John Clancy, the 
sub-Sheriff of Dublin, who has been in every stirring event 
that has happened in Ireland in his time, cut short the 
palaver of Mr. Matthias MacDonnell Bodkin, who was in 
the editorial chair. "Will you walk out, Matty?" he asked, 

[ 370 ] 



THE PARNELL SPLIT 

"or will you be thrown out?" Matty walked out; and Mr. 
Parnell left the office in charge of his followers. 

That night there was the great meeting at the Rotunda. 
All Dublin was mad for Parnell. The Dublin working men 
are always to be found on the right side in politics, and 
this time Dublin was practically unanimous. Dora Sigerson 
(Mrs. Clement Shorter), Mary FitzPatrick (now Mrs. W. 
Sullivan, the wife of the son of a one-time President of 
Queen's College, Cork; Dr. Sullivan is well known as a 
specialist in mental diseases and criminology), and myself 
started out from Dr. Sigerson' s house in Clare Street under 
the escort of three Trinity College students. My father 
apparently had thought it wise to leave me to the care of 
a younger man, for he went on his own account. 

I marvel now at the temerity that launched us into that 
crowd, a seething, swaying, dense crowd that filled Sack- 
ville Street as far as the Pillar and stretched up Rutland 
Square the way Mr. Parnell must come. None of us had 
any misgivings. We were too excited. We got into the 
crowd, and our escorts pushed and elbowed a way for us 
towards the door by which ticket-holders for the platform 
were to enter. I arrived safely enough, though just as we 
were carried in by the crowd as though by a wave of the 
sea, I heard a despairing cry from poor Mary FitzPatrick, 
who was as small as a child, "Oh, Katie, I've lost my Louise 
hat." She did indeed arrive without a vestige of her head- 
gear from the Regent Street milliner, but herself intact for- 
tunately. I daresay it made it easier for us that the whole 
crowd was In sympathy. 

I found myself carried on a rush through the door, where 
the stewards struggled in vain to take tickets. A moment 
for breathing ; then another short struggle, and I was being 
helped up on to the platform by friendly hands, the first 

[ 3/1 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

my father's. He was delighted that I was in safety and 
near him. What a moment it was! It was worth living 
for. Everyone was talking eagerly, excitedly : no one listen- 
ing. All manner of people were shaking hands with one, 
as often as not, absolute strangers. Oh, that crowded hour 
of glorious life! It was well worth living for if one had 
had to die the next hour. 

I quote here my immediate impressions of the meeting, 
contributed to some American paper or other. 

"It was nearly 8.30 when we heard the bands coming, 
then the windows were lit up by the lurid glare of thou- 
sands of torches in the street outside. There was a distant 
roaring like the sea. The great gathering within waited, 
silent with expectation. Then the cheering began, and we 
craned our necks and looked out eagerly, and there was the 
tall, slender, distinguished figure of the Irish leader, mak- 
ing its way across the platform. I don't think any words 
could do justice to his reception. The house rose at him; 
everywhere around there was a sea of passionate faces, 
loving, admiring, almost worshipping that silent, pale man. 
The cheering broke out again and again; there was no 
quelling it. Mr. Parnell bowed from side to side, sweeping 
the assemblage with his glance. The people were fairly 
mad with excitement. I don't think anyone outside Ire- 
land can understand what a charm Mr. Parnell has for 
the Irish heart ; that wonderful personality of his, his proud 
bearing, his handsome, strong face, the distinction of look 
which marks him more than anyone I have ever seen. All 
these are irresistible to the artistic Irish. 

"I said to Dr. Kenny, who was standing by me : 'He is 
the only quiet man here.' 'Outwardly,' said the keen medi- 
cal man, emphatically. Looking again, one saw the dilated 
nostrils, the flashing eye, the passionate face; the leader 

[ 372 ] 



THE PARNELL SPLIT 

was simply drinking in thirstily this immense love, whicli 
must have been more heartening than one can say after 
that bitter time in the English capital. Mr. Parnell looked 
frail enough in body — perhaps the black frock-coat, buttoned 
so tightly across his chest, gave him that look of attenua- 
tion; but he also looked full of indomitable spirit and fire. 

"For a time silence was not obtainable. Then Father 
Walter Hurley climbed on the table and stood with his arms 
extended. It was curious how the attitude silenced a crowd 
which could hear no words. 

"When Mr. Parnell came to speak, the passion within him 
found vent. It was a wonderful speech; not one word of 
it for oratorical effect, but every word charged with a preg- 
nant message to the people who were listening to him, and 
the millions who should read him. It was a long speech, 
lasting nearly an hour : but listened to with intense interest, 
punctuated by fierce cries against men whom this crisis had 
made odious, now and again marked in a pause by a deep- 
drawn moan of delight. It was a great speech — simple, 
direct, suave — with no device and no artificiality. Mr. 
Parnell said long ago, in a furious moment in the House 
of Commons, that he cared nothing for the opinion of the 
English people. One remembered it now, noting his pas- 
sionate assurances to his own people, who loved him too 
well to ask questions." 

After the meeting was over, so unsated were we that we 
actually fought our way up Rutland Square to hear Mr. 
Parnell speak a few words from the balcony of the Na- 
tional Club to the huge crowd which had not been able to 
get into the Rotunda. Afterwards we went to Corless's, a 
famous Dublin restaurant, where my father awaited us and 
gave us supper — a very needful thing, for enthusiasm is 
apt to make one very hungry. He would have oysters, and 

[373] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

when the waiter asked him how many oysters he said, 
"Let us begin on a hundred." The waiter gasped, and I 
had much difficulty in inducing my father to begin with 
dozens instead of hundreds. 

That night, during the meeting, United Ireland was re- 
captured by the Anti-ParnelHtes. Mr. Barry O'Brien has 
given an eyewitness's graphic account of the recapture, 
which was much more exciting than the original capture. 
My father brought the news of it to me, describing how 
Mr. Parnell tried to leap the railings into the area, and 
struggled with those who held him back, while his follow- 
ers went in his stead. This time the Anti-Parnellites were 
not gently handled. I wonder they escaped with their lives 
from the crowd. 

Mr. Parnell, it will be remembered, burst the door open 
with a crowbar before his eager followers could admit him. 
Rushing upstairs, he flung open the front window and spoke 
to the crowd. I have a curious relic of that day in my pos- 
session. A few years ago a young priest, whose father had 
been a strong Parnelllte, sent it to me. It is a copy of 
Mr. T. P. O'Connor's Parnell Movement which Mr. Parnell 
found on the table in the United Ireland office, and flung 
into the street. The mud of the street where it fell face 
downward is on the printed page. Inside the fly-leaf is 
written : 

"This book was thrown out of the office of United Ire- 
land by Mr. Chas. S. Parnell, on the morning of December 
nth, 1890, when he, by the aid of a crowbar, broke open 
the offices of the above newspaper. I was present and re- 
ceived the book as It fell to the ground from the window of 
said office. A. H. Barden." 

[ 374 ] 



THE PARNELL SPLIT 

Dr. Shaw, the witty Fellow of T.C.D., and editor of the 
Dublin Evening Mail, had referred to United Ireland under 
the editorship of Mr. Matthias Bodkin, with reference to 
its old days of prohibition, when it called itself "Insup- 
pressible United Ireland," as "William O'Brien's Inexpressi- 
ble held up by a Bodkin." 

Father Healy's jeu d'esprit regarding Mr. Bodkin's vio- 
lent expulsion may be given here. 

"Sure, it was foretold in the Scriptures," he said, when 
he heard the news. 

"Not really. Father." 

"Oh, bedad it was. Don't you remember? 'And the 
lot fell upon Matthias.' " 

The next excitement was the Kilkenny election, at which 
Mr. Parnell's candidate, Mr. Vincent Scully, was beaten. 
But before that I ought to have mentioned a visit I paid 
to the United Ireland office, which was being guarded by 
Mr. Parnell's men under siege. It was Mr. Pat O'Brien, 
I think, who took Mary Fitzpatrick and myself in. It was 
very thrilling. There was a concerted knock at the door, 
which opened and let us in. In the hall were several of 
Mr. Parnell's stalwarts, ready to throw out any enemy who 
presented himself. We stayed for a few minutes, looked 
round to see what was to be seen, and were let out again 
with the same precautions. 

During the weeks that followed I was the recipient of 
many anonymous letters, some merely ugly and insulting, 
others written more in sorrow than in anger. A sadder 
thing was the parting of the ways which divided friend 
from friend, and made enemies of members of the same 
household. I suffered less in this way than most people, 
for practically all my friends were with me, except a priest 
here and there, who was professionally bound to be on the 

[ 375 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

other side. As for members of the household — well, the 
members of my father's household were bound to be Parnell- 
ites. If they were not he would have wanted to know the 
reason why. Not that any one of them was disafifected, 
happily. Nor were our neighbours. Dublin and Dublin 
County were practically solid for Mr. Parnell. 

At the first possible opportunity I became a member of 
the National League, which had remained loyal to Mr. 
Parnell. "We have the Leader; we have the paper; we 
have the League," said Dr. Byrne of the Freeman's Journal, 
little knowing how soon the paper would slip from under 
his feet. Women had not hitherto joined the League, but 
I was proposed and accepted. Some other women followed 
my example — one, I think, Miss Charlotte O' Brian, the 
daughter of William Smith O'Brian, well known and hon- 
oured for her labours on behalf of Irish emigrant girls as 
well as for her literary work. She was a convert, and a 
fervent one, to the Catholic Church. Indeed, in my experi- 
ence, the women who were loyal to Mr. Parnell were nearly 
all devout Catholics. It was not so very pleasant to be 
at daggers drawn with the priests, for us who were sincere 
and faithful Catholics. Indeed many of us suffered. But 
we believed we saw the right thing, and we did it with- 
out counting the cost. Time has proved that we were right. 

But the sunderings of friends were terrible. I still be- 
lieve it was a sifting, and that the best took the side of Mr. 
Parnell. The bitterness was incredible. A distinguished 
Dublin Jesuit said to someone after I had joined the Na- 
tional League that if he met me in the street he would not 
lift his hat to me. I have said earlier in this book, or 
perhaps I only meant to say, that Father Russell never tried 
to argue me out of my convictions, even at the time of 
"the Split." I believe that is true. Certainly his friend- 



THE PARNELL SPLIT 

ship showed no slackening. Yet we were in opposite camps 
— of feeling. By chance, I have come upon a letter of my 
own to Mrs. Gill, in the autumn after Mr. Parnell's death. 
Her husband was an Anti-Parnellite. Not that it made any 
difference in my relations with that house, after one or two 
breezes. Mrs. Gill was too sweet and comfortable to be 
anti-anything with the thoroughness required in the bitter 
struggle of that day. From her greenhouses I carried a 
great basket of flowers to Mr. Parnell's lying-in-state. The 
letter betrays the inward bitterness of my soul when it was 
written. She was the dearest, warmest, and sweetest of 
friends to me. 

"On the whole I think I won't come. After all It is not 
fair to identify you too much with me. I've been feeling 
quite a wicked person since I received a letter this morn- 
ing from Father Russell saying that he could do nothing 
for my poems or the Nun in the Irish Monthly, because 
of the part I'd taken in politics. It isn't his will, but 
stronger wills outside. He told me for the first time that 
several of his subscribers returned the Irish Monthly last 
December because I had something in it. They think me 
very wicked, but perhaps they are like the Pharisee in the 
Gospel in the sight of God." 

Oh, it was not easy for many of us; it was bitterly hard 
for us to have the things said of us that were said then. 
The campaign against Mr. Parnell was conducted very often 
with reckless indecency. When a peasant is coarse he can 
be very coarse indeed. One's heart bled for the man who 
was stabbed through the woman he held dear. There was 
no pity, no mercy. 

Sometimes the things that happened were amusing. A 
country meeting, with the parish priest in the chair, passed 
a resolution : 

[3771 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

'That we, the members of the branch of the , 

do place on record our condemnation and scorn of brazen- 
faced Katherine Tynan for having joined Parnell's infamous 
League, and consider her a disgrace to the fair fame of Irish 
womanhood." 

These things left no sting. Mr. Parnell was worth them, 
and our loyalty only burned up higher. But what a Catholic 
woman could suffer who was a devout Catholic while being 
a staunch follower of Mr. Parnell, may be read in the re- 
ports of the Meath Petition, which, tried before a Judge 
who was also a most devout Catholic, resulted in the unseat- 
ing of the two Anti-Parnellite members because of the 
methods used to return them by the priests. Well — one 
turns to Mr. Parnell for a word of tolerance for the priests 
in those days. "The priests have been our very good friends 
in the past," he said. "They will be our very good friends 
in the future. Do not say a word against them." 

That day at the National League my father and I stood 
and talked with Mr. Parnell for a while. "I have not seen 
you," he said with the delicate enunciation which belonged 
to him, "since the party at Sir Charles Russell's." Kilkenny 
was fought and lost then. We talked of the fight. How 
changed his manner was to his friends in those days! It 
was not in him to be effusive: but he looked at you with 
a steady, friendly glance that said : "I know you : I can 
trust you : you are my friend." 

Then or another day Mrs. Wyse Power, another ardent 
Parnellite, was present. "Ah, Mr. Parnell," she said, 
"things would have been very different if you had given 
us votes for women. You'd have swept the country." 

"I daresay you are quite right," he said, smiling as he 
turned away. 

Going along Sackville-O'Connell Street afterwards — it is 

[378] 





Dr. Joseph E. Kenny 



Ethna Carrerry 





John Clancy 



Timothy C. Harrington 



THE PARNELL SPLIT 

characteristic of Ireland that the principal street of Dublin 
is named according to your religious and political convic- 
tions — under the portico of the Post Office I ran up against 
Sir William Butler. He stood frowning down at me. "We 
are at this moment the most disgraced people under 
Heaven," he said, with a terrible severity of aspect. I 
quailed. Was he an Anti-Parnellite, and could he read in 
my face that I had just been received into the National 
League ? I was fighting my corner well and valiantly : but 
I had and have a constitutional aversion to running up 
against unpleasantness. There was a terrible pause. Then : 
"The people who have betrayed a leader like Parnell will 
never make a nation !" 

Oh, the relief of it! I wrung his hand joyously. He 
must have been amazed at the change in my face. 

To be sure, in Dublin it was easy enough to be a Parnell- 
ite. We used to pity the isolated Parnellites in the country. 
We were passionately grateful to the priests who remained 
our friends. It is pathetic to go back to those days and 
read how eagerly we clung to even the slightest ecclesiastical 
sanction. In Dublin we could always find priests who were 
non-political if they were not with us. It was terrible for 
those in the country who had to receive the ministrations of 
a partisan and violently partisan priest. We lost the priests 
from our tables, from our social life. In some cases they 
came back when the bitterness was over. But perhaps the 
relations between the people and the priests have never been 
quite the same as they were prior to the days of the great 
upheaval. 



[379] 



CHAPTER XXXI 

1891 

The year 1891 was completely absorbed by the Parnell cam- 
paign. Never was such a parting of the ways. Only 
Parnellites came to our house in those days, and I may say 
that it was a very hospitable house. How we talked ! There 
was something electrical in the atmosphere that kept us 
tense and eager all that year. If occasionally, very occa- 
sionally, a faint-heart or a wobbler — to say nothing of an 
Anti-Parnellite — found themselves by accident in this nest 
of Parnellites, how he or she was ecrase, wiped out. But 
wobblers or faint-hearts or Anti-Parnellites did not come 
after the first. 

Oh, the exhilaration of those days, when we had a Chief 
who was worth fighting for ! My devotion to Mr. Parnell 
left me, so far as politics are concerned, burnt out, ex- 
hausted. How drab the days, how small the politicians, to 
us who knew Parnell ! 

The excitement, the exaltation carried us along. We ran 
through the year, little knowing what waited us at the end. 
1 see now, after twenty-one years, that Parnell lives and 
shines by that one year. To the Muse of History it mat- 
ters very little whether movements fall or succeed, whether 
men live or die untimely. She is concerned only with men. 
And here was a man to whom longer living could have 
added nothing of lustre, of splendour. To the Muse of 
History it matters little that Parnell died when he did. He 
had reached his full height. His place is secure. 

Sunday after Sunday an ardent band of Parnellites sur- 
rounded my father's board. In that summer of 1891 there 

[ 380 ] 



1891 

was that series of meetings throughout the country to which 
Mr. Parnell travelled Sunday after Sunday as though he 
knew the night was coming. His restless energy in those 
days was amazing. He must have been borne up in that 
last year, above the cruelties he suffered, by the passion of 
loyalty he had evoked from those who had remained true 
to him. If his path was beset by brutality and insult, which 
must have been terribly galling to his proud and sensitive 
nature, it was beset also by loyalties, little and great. The 
little loyalties were the sweet loyalties of the poor and 
humble. 

Even still, after twenty-one years, one comes upon traces 
of it. A couple of years ago I happened to be staying in 
a Dublin hotel. It was a wet October Sunday — Parnell 
Sunday. "A bad day for the Procession!" I said to the 
chambermaid. "Aye," she said; "the sky's weepin' for him; 
it always does." I — "It's like his funeral day." She — "It 
is: I remember it well." I (surprised) — "But you must 
have been very young at the time." She — "I was only a 
slip, but I followed him all the same. The skies were cryin' 
for him, and they've cried ever since. Sure, why wouldn't 
they ? It was the worst day we ever had when we lost him." 

The other day I was lunching at the house of a well- 
known Irish Conservative politician. He said to me : "I 
suppose you were a tremendous Parnellite?" "Was and am 
and shall be," I returned. "I thought it was all over in 
the quiet nearly twenty years of my life in England. But 
when I came back I knew it was there still. I am True 
Blue Parnellite through and through." 

Saying which, I turned about to the man-servant who was 
offering me a dish. I met a face of such delighted and 
beaming approval that I knew, before the mask of the well- 

[381] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

trained servant fell again, that here was a Parnellite and 
a brother. 

In that year my Life of Mother Xaveria Fallon had the 
misfortune, for the Nuns, to be published. The National 
Press of the Anti-Parnellites, which the ragged little news- 
boys of Dublin, Parnellite to a boy, used to offer you as 
"Tim Healy's toe-rag,'' appeared with a couple of columns 
of abuse of me and the book, tearing the poor nuns to pieces 
incidentally. It caused the utmost consternation among 
the nuns. Some of them, I fear, have looked at me askance 
ever since, because it was my Parnellism which was re- 
sponsible for this amazing farrago of insult. For many 
years I thought it was written by an old friend of mine, 
James O'Connor, once a Fenian, later on a member of Par- 
liament. I was glad to learn in later years that the author 
was really a person who is now a Professor in the National 
University, whom I remember as a pink-nosed boy lavish- 
ing complimentary epithets upon the young debaters in a 
Convent-School Debating Society of which I was President. 

It was strange indeed to be cast down from the pedestal 
of honour which I had occupied with priests and nuns and 
the orthodox Catholics generally. Mr. Parnell stood with 
his back against the wall. We also who stood by him had 
our backs against the wall, with all the forces allied against 
us. To be sure there were priests with us, but not many of 
them spoke out as did Father Nicholas Murphy, P.P. of 
Kilmanagh, Co. Kilkenny, who kept in the forefront of the 
battle with us all the time; not many of them were like 
Father Walter Hurley. I turned up the other day a 
pamphlet which brought joy to our hearts in those days: 
"A Defence of the Parnell Leadership by a D.D. of Rome." 
I never knew who the D.D. of Rome was, but his Defence 
was a great comfort to us. 

[382] 



1891 

The Parnell betrayal remains and will remain as the most 
disgraceful fact in Irish history. A word about the char- 
acter of those who stood by Parnell may not be uninterest- 
ing. Of his own party the few notorious evil-livers de- 
serted him on "the moral question." Those who stood by 
him, the Redmonds, Dr. Kenny, Edmund Leamy, James 
Carew, Timothy Harrington, were irreproachable. And 
speaking of Timothy Harrington, one remembers that he 
alone of the four members of Parliament in America at 
the time of "the Split," stood by his Leader without hesi- 
tation. I remember his telling me when he came back how 
the Irish servants, hanging over the banisters of the New 
York hotel, called out to him : "Mr. Harrington, stick to 
the Chief. Mr. Harrington, never desert him." 

Mr. Parnell had a great fascination for women, but he 
fascinated men almost as much. There is one of those who 
stood by him for whose action I have always had the great- 
est admiration, and that Is Count Plunkett. Count Plunkett 
belonged to what one might call the official Catholics of 
Dublin. I mean he was one of those trusted Catholic 
laymen who represented the best and the most orthodox 
Catholic feeling of Dublin. He had entertained the Papal 
Legate, Monsignor Persico, when he came to Dublin. He 
was a Papal Count. In all things he was of the most ortho- 
dox. Yet he came out to stand by Parnell, at whose Land 
League movement he had looked askance, and bore with 
the rest of us the obloquy, the unjust condemnation, the 
wrongs, that even yet have left their iron in the soul. 

It was worth it all. A good many of those who went 
against Mr. Parnell may have wished in later days that 
they had acted differently. As I have said, at the moment 
the issue was obscured by those years during which Mr. 
Parnell had lain perdu. For the sure instinct which made 

[383] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

me spring to his side then I can never be grateful enough. 
It was worth all one could suffer to have taken the right 
road at the parting of the ways. 

There was plenty of exhilaration for us in that year. No 
adherent to the big battalions can ever know the joy of 
fighting against immense odds with a leader who is worth 
all the risks and all the chances. We laughed ! Being Irish, 
we laughed a deal in that year that was to end in tears. 
Mr. Parnell himself enjoyed the fight. "What will you 
do, Mr. Parnell," someone asked him, "if you are the only 
member of your party returned in the next Parliament?" 
"Then I shall be sure of having a party whose integrity 
will not be sapped,' he replied. For the first time he was 
sure of the passionate fealty of his followers. For the first 
time he was a King. For the first time we had a King 
for whom the sacrifice of life itself would not have been a 
hard thing. "Charlie is my darling,'' we used to say as we 
lived over again the Jacobite passion of loyalty for our born 
king of men. 

My father followed him about to all his great meetings. 
Sometimes the meetings were near home, and a number of 
the members of Parliament and prominent speakers would 
come in for a meal. Sometimes the meeting was at a dis- 
tance. Once, at Thurles, my father, standing behind Mr. 
Parnell and thinking he looked tired, procured a chair and 
drew his attention to it by touching him on the shoulder. 
Mr. Parnell turned round with a sharp, nervous irritability. 
Seeing who it was, the fierce look softened. "Ah, I didn't 
know it was you, Andrew," he said. My father liked to 
lay stress on that "Andrew." 

I remember a story that made Mr. Parnell laugh. It 
was of a County Kerry small farmer of whom the neigh- 

[384] 



1891 

hours said: "That's the greatest man alive. He made 
four priests out of three cows and a few pigs." 

Once a friend of mine sitting beside him at dinner spoke 
sympathetically of the immense fatigues he had to bear. 
Mr. Parnell smiled. "AH that is a bagatelle," he said. 
"The only thing I am afraid of is the bad whisky." 

My father, in his top hat and black overcoat faced with 
velvet, might have passed for a very good-looking parish 
priest. The story was started by some of the frolicsome 
ones that his appearance on various platforms had brought 
over many waverers, that the people said, "Sure, hasn't 
Parnell got a suspended Bishop going about with him?" 
This humourousness my father heard with a wry smile. 
He would not have minded being taken for a Bishop. It 
was the "suspended" he did not like. Similarly he was 
displeased with a genealogist who traced his descent from 
an Abbot of Glendalough about the time of St. Patrick. 
He thought it a reflection on the conduct of an ancestor. 

We used to wait at the newspaper offices for the results 
of the elections. There was one at Carlow in that sum- 
mer. Mr. Parnell's candidate, Mr. A. J. Kettle, was de- 
feated. Another Professor of the National University, who 
had been a friend of mine before the Split, and came to 
see me the other day after the lapse of years, told me that 
on the day the Carlow election returns came in he was 
warned by one of the Sigersons not to go a certain way. 
"You will meet Katie," she said, "and she is furious." I 
forgave that Anti-Parnellite because during all the bitter 
time he was bringing the Parnellite papers to a nun who 
was an ardent Parnellite and the sister of perhaps the best- 
known priest in Dublin. 

I have another friend to whom I said the other day : "T 
only forgive you for having been Anti-Parnellite because 

[383] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

you were always a Whig." Being the most reasonable per- 
son in the world, he accepted the statement, even remarking 

cheerfully, "That is like Parnell. 'No one minds B / 

he said. 'He was always a Whig.' " 

In June, 1891, Mr. Parnell married Mrs. O'Shea. Only 
in Ireland would it have followed that the campaign against 
him became more merciless and more deadly. Those 
"moralists" had neither reason nor mercy. Some of them 
who owed everything to Mr. Parnell were among the most 
rabid of his revilers. I have heard of one of the deadliest 
of his enemies at the time of the Galway elections coming 
to a newspaper man with a telegram from Mrs. O'Shea to 
Mr. Parnell. It had been intercepted somehow or other. 
It ran — it sounds Pickwickian — "Be sure to wear your 
skull-cap when speaking." "Now," said this person, "now 
w^e have clear proof of his infamy. Here is evidence of 
this disgraceful intrigue, and all the world shall hear of it." 
The other man waited till he had done : then said quietly, 
"If you would only keep your head you would see that 
that telegram would tell in his favour and not against him. 
Don't you see that it is a wife and not a mistress who sends 
such a message? And other people will see it too." That 
telegram never reached the public. 

Over the elections there used to be great fun and excite- 
ment. Stories were flying from one to another of the en- 
counters with the priests who brought the obedient voters 
to the polling-booths; of the number of dead men who 
voted; of the word that was handed round. "Vote Early 
and Vote Often." Very often the stories were "ben 
trovato," but there were "playboys" in those days who 
were up to all sorts of pranks. One of the most prominent 
among these was Michael Manning, a Waterford man, 
about seven feet high and broad in proportion. Once when 

[386] 



1891 

we offered him a lift on an outside car, we, being a very 
comfortable weight, were high in air, while his feet almost 
trailed on the ground. He had an immense red face, a 
rolling eye of infinite humour, and the richest brogue 
imaginable. He addressed all the world as "Child!" from 
an immense height, and the first sight of him was calculated 
to send one off into bubbling laughter with an anticipation 
of joyous things to come. He was up to any amount of 
"divilment," and so was John O'Mahony, newly come up 
from Cork, who was afterwards my brother-in-law. What 
rich laughter there was at my father's dinner-table. Sun- 
day after Sunday, when these and such as these were 
present ! 

One should have kept a commonplace book in those days. 
Coming back to Ireland we have found that the multiplicity 
of good stories poured into our ears at a sitting have this 
effect, that they jostle each other so that it is very hard 
to disentangle one from the other. Perhaps the sense is 
blunted by some years of life in English country. The elec- 
tions certainly were full of humour. They had their ab- 
surdities. An Anti-Parnellite voter would be driven to the 
polling-booth by his Parnellite coachman; each would go 
in and record his vote, with the result that both might as 
well have stayed at home. In the General Election which 
came after Mr. Parnell's death my father was personating 
agent for the Parnell candidate at the Tallaght polling- 
booth. He kept a sharp look-out for men in his own em- 
ployment as they came to vote. Of only one had he any 
doubt — a cantankerous person, who was always in oppo- 
sition. "Walk in there, Mick," said my father, in a terrible 
voice, "and vote according to your conscience. And if you 
don't it will be the worse for you." 

In a good many churches at that time there were Anti- 

[387] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Parnellite sermons or addresses delivered by the priests on 
Sunday mornings. The Parnellite men in some cases 
answered by walking out when the sermon began. This 
was from my point of view deplorable — and illogical. I 
said as much once to an intellectual priest. "It may be 
illogical," he said, "but it's human nature." Well, one story 
I heard was of an occasion when seven men stood up and 
left the church. Father Pat paused for a second, then re- 
marked while they were still within hearing, "There go the 
Seven Deadlies." 

Another story of those days was concerned with the fear 
among the more ignorant of the peasantry that something 
dreadful would happen to them if they opposed the priests. 
"Did you ever hear, Molly," asked a weak-kneed one of 
his stout better half, "that the priest could turn you into 
a mouse if you were to go against him?" "I'm ashamed 
of you," said Molly, "to be talkin' such nonsense." "You 
don't think there's anything in it?" "'Deed an' I don't, 
you foolish man." "Well, anyway — wouldn't it be just 
as well to turn out the cat ?" 

We used to meet Mr. Parnell at the Kingsbridge when 
he returned from his meetings. I think it was the evening 
of the Carlow result that we drove down on an outside 
car to await his arrival, and receive his hearty handshake 
as he left the train. We drove after his car to Dr. Kenny's 
— coming in for some of the cheering — went in and talked 
with him, he standing with his back to the fire, without 
which one does not go even of a summer evening in Ire- 
land, talking easily in the most friendly way till the dinner- 
bell rang and we went away, leaving him to the food and 
rest he needed. 

It was a year of incessant movement. I remember the 
Leinster Hall Convention, and the waiting crowds outside, 

[388] 



1891 

and the enthusiasm within the Hall. In the midst of the 
enthusiasm, Mr. Parnell turned quietly aside for a talk with 
a Dr. Hyland, who was a mining expert, on the subject 
of his Wicklow mines. This detachment reminded me of 
the days long ago when the Land League was only in its 
inception. He was in the chair, at his feet a beautiful red 
setter dog, which had accompanied him from Avondale. In 
mid-course of business he got up, went out and was absent 
for some time, to the amazement of the others. When at 
last he came back he said very quietly, "I remembered that 
the dog had not had his dinner." 

We were always going to meetings of one kind or an- 
other. My father had accepted the Presidency of the Work- 
ing Men's Club at Inchicore, the members of which were 
mainly the skilled artisans employed in the great railway 
works. He was very much beloved by these men, and he 
never missed a meeting. The meetings took place in the 
evening, and were often prolonged to a late hour. I used 
to sit, more or less patiently, waiting for him, in the little 
pony-trap outside. Sometimes it must have been very late. 
I remember a night of full moon — one side of the street 
light as day, the other in velvety black shadow. Suddenly, 
from the blackness there was projected upon the bright 
space a number of queer shadows, coming in a procession. 
I watched, with half-alarmed curiosity: and presendy the 
shadows resolved themselves into a man carrying a table 
on his head, a woman carrying a shapeless bundle, and three 
children carrying respectively a chair, a sweeping-brush, 
and a teapot. I remembered it was the eve of Quarter-day, 
and realised that here was a flitting of the kind that "shoots 
the moon." 

I had not always things so diverting to occupy me: but 
after the meeting we used to drive home — we had usually 

[ 389 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

bought something in the way of shell-fish for our supper — 
to find the family gone to bed and the door on the latch, 
and Pat, my St. Bernard, left on guard, coming out with 
a wagging tail to welcome us. I can feel myself blinking 
now, coming in from the dark night to the firelit, lamplit 
room with its spread supper-table. After we had enjoyed 
our supper we used to sit and talk while my father smoked. 
Ah — they were good days. One lived every hour of them. 



[390] 



CHAPTER XXXII 

THE NIGHT 

On the first Sunday of October, 1891, Michael Manning, 
"Long" John Clancy, and others of the wild spirits had 
played a notable prank. After Mr. Parnell's marriage the 
Freeman's Journal had ratted to the Anti-Parnellites. The 
prank was to have a mock funeral of the Freeman to Kil- 
barrack Churchyard, near Howth, where Higgins, "the 
Sham Squire," an infamous eighteenth-century celebrity 
who was one of the first founders of the Freeman, was 
buried. It was a prank which set all Dublin laughing — 
but, alas ! 

That was the day of the Creggs meeting, to which Mr. 
Parnell went in defiance of his doctors. "If I do not go," 
he said, "they will say I am dead." He went in company 
with Mr. J. P. Quinn, long connected with his movement; 
and Mr. Luke Hayden was the only one of his party at 
the meeting. 

Next day there was the inaugural meeting of the new 
paper at the National League Rooms. Mr. Parnell came 
in looking very pale and ill, his arm in a sling. It was a 
crowded meeting, barely standing-room. We all noticed 
how ill the Chief looked, and some of us begged Mr. Har- 
rington to fetch him a chair, which he did, although he said 
that Mr. Parnell would not like it; and sure enough he re- 
fused to sit down. He stood during his speech, but at the 
end he was obviously very much exhausted, though instead 
of sitting down he went and leant against the wall with a 
very weary air. 

We were all in high spirits. The greater the reverses, 

[391] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

the greater the opposition, the higher rose our spirits. 
There was something extraordinarily refined about Mr. 
Parnell's voice and way of speaking. I remember his refer- 
ences to "young Mr. Gray" at that meeting — poor "young 
Mr. Gray," who I beheve really had some elements of great- 
ness about him, if the bad fairy had not dropped in some- 
thing of indecision, of insincerity among the good fairy's 
gifts at his christening, if he had not been too young, if 
he had had a less troubled time in which to play his part, 
if he had had wise counsellors. He had found himself a 
mere boy in command of the Freeman's Journal at one of 
the most difficult moments in Irish history. The Freeman 
went Parnellite. Young Gray had magnificent ideas. He 
started special trains to distribute the papers all over the 
country in the early mornings. He had more ideas than 
have gone to the making of huge journalistic fortunes. He 
had delightful manners, and the Irish youth of his class 
is often lacking in manners. He was gentle, courteous, 
painstaking: he could stand a baiting which few men could 
have endured with scarcely a quiver of the eyelids. It was 
said that his mother, a devout Catholic, took fright at the 
strenuousness of the fight between Parnellism and the 
priests: that her scruples prevailed with her son when the 
Freeman "ratted." I have only to say, en parenthese, that 
women as religious as she stood by Mr. Parnell to the end. 
Well, it was not often that Mr. Parnell handled an op- 
ponent ungently, and he was perfectly gentle in his refer- 
ences to young Gray. It was always a delight to hear 
him speak. He was surrounded by a crowd of orators of 
the florid kind; and he was not called an orator, by his 
own people at least. But if direct and quiet yet passionate 
appeal, a capacity for saying the thing he needed to say 
in the most convincing and briefest manner, fastidious 

[392] 




Charles S. Parnell 
(during his last illness) 



THE NIGHT 

choice of words, a fine reticence, a beautiful delivery, and 
a voice of the most delicate timbre could make an orator, 
he was one. In fact I look upon him as the finest orator I 
ever heard. I may be prejudiced. I have suffered all my 
life from an incapacity for hearing the spoken word with- 
out drowsiness and languor. Wherefore being read aloud 
to is little pleasure, and in the matter of sermons I find 
great difficulty in following. I have heard Mr. Parnell 
speak amid a crowd of orators who have only succeeded in 
making me drowsy. When he began every sense was alert. 
Here would be no flummery — not a redundant word. He 
had his message to deliver, and he would deliver it in the 
clearest, the most concise way. In that year of the "Split" 
it was heart speaking to heart, deep calling to deep. 

I remember that some of the speakers — the plain men who 
were ready to plank down money for their shares — were a 
bit prolix, and Mr. Harrington, who was "boss" of the 
League, was inclined to closure them somewhat abruptly. 
But Mr. Parnell would not have it. In his quiet way he 
interposed. Everyone should have his say. 

One very wild-looking man, who was sitting in the body 
of the meeting just in front of Mr. Parnell, had started up 
two or three times to obtain a hearing. Mr. Parnell leant 
forward with his air of perfect courtesy, and asked him 
to wait his turn. The turn came. Up got the wild man 
of the West, his flaming locks flying in the breeze. "Your 
name, please?" said Mr. Parnell. Then came a tremendous 
roar. "Mr. O'Hehir" — a pause — "from Clare." There was 
a huge outburst of laughter, in which Mr. Parnell joined, 
and it was some time before the merriment subsided suffi- 
ciently to allow the would-be orator to proceed. 

Mr. Parnell had captured the hillside men, that is to say 
the Fenians. Mr. O'Hehir from Clare was one of them, I 

[ 393 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

think, and I rather think also that he played a romantic 
part a few years later in the history of the time. The 
Fenians were certainly representative of what was most 
ideal in Irish Nationalism. They had hated the Land 
League rightly. John O'Leary, the most stainless idealist, 
had come forward to stand by Parnell at the time of the 
Split. I remember how he used to give one of his great 
laughs. "Good God in Heaven," he would say, "while he 
was ruining the morals of the country they were all with 
him. Now that it is only a question of his own morals they 
are all against him." John O'Leary had a way of saying 
everything excellently well. In their own place I shall give 
some of his obiter dicta. 

After the meeting we all crowded round Mr. Parnell, for 
a word and a hand-shake. He was crossing to England 
that night. Dr. Kenny, who watched over him with many 
loves rolled into one, was against his travelling. But he 
was not one to submit. I dare say, being so ill, he longed 
to be at home with the one heart he leant upon. 

"I will come back on Saturday week," he said. 

Things were always perceptibly duller when he was out 
of the country. I had a visitor, Anna Johnston, who be- 
came afterwards Mrs. Seumas MacManus — Ethna Carbery 
of the poems and the poetic prose. She too was an ardent 
Parnellite, her father being an old hillside man. 

On Wednesday, the 7th of October, she and I went into 
Dublin together. We had a day of gaieties before us, and 
were as happy as possible. We thought it strange after- 
wards that we should have been so happy. 

Going down town on top of the tram we became aware 
of an unusual commotion in the street : of groups standing 
about talking, of people asking questions and going away 
with a hanging head. Suddenly there was a clamour, and 

[ 394 ] 



THE NIGHT 

the streets were full of the newsboys shouting the Stop- 
Press Edition. "Death of Mr. Parnell! Death of Mr. 
Parnell!" 

We got down from the tram at Trinity College. The air 
was full of the horrible sounds. We would not believe it. 
It was a device of the enemy, a wicked, horrible lie that 
would be contradicted almost as soon as it was spoken. 
Everyone was buying papers and talking in agitated voices. 
We spoke to absolute strangers as we snatched our papers. 
"Do you think it is true?" No one knew. We would not 
believe it. We had said that with the Chief — only the 
Chief — our cause must win. We could afford to wait while 
all those others went by. We could not believe that Death 
himself had intervened and that the great days were over. 

We went down to the National League. When we came 
into the outer office, Timothy Harrington stared at us in a 
blind way, turned about, and went into the inner office. The 
place was besieged with people clamouring to know if the 
news was true. 

We went home. I really feared for the effect of the shock 
on my father, whom we had left going quietly about his 
country business. I thought I would go home and tell him 
myself, but he had had a telegram before I arrived. 

Even then — what passionate gratitude we had to the 
occasional priest who came in with the others to the Na- 
tional League Office, asked if it was true, and turned away 
with a stricken face. There was a considerable number 
of priests who were Parnellites, but, since it is the essential 
thing of a priest's being to obey, few made any public show 
of their loyalty. 

Two days later we were arranging for a public funeral. 
I remember Edmtuid Leamy, that soft-hearted, thorough- 
going idealist, James Carew, charming debonnair, Henry 

[ 395 ] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

Harrison, the tall "Stripling" whom we loved because he 
had fought by the Chief's side "in the danger zone," per- 
haps a little, too, because he was young, good-looking, and 
had delightful manners. There we sat hearing the arrange- 
ments being made. Now that dear, high-minded, honest 
Tim Harrington is gone to his reward, it will not hurt 
him if I say that while he bustled through the business and 
put a stopper on the impracticable ones, we recalled the 
gentle patience and courtesy of the Chief, whom we should 
never have with us again. 

The Saturday morning we spent — a Ladies' Committee 
had been formed hastily — arranging flowers and wreaths 
for the funeral. If the names of some of those who sent 
flowers were told at this day it would be an indiscretion — 
wives of high officials : shining lights in the Catholic life 
of Dublin : names had to be suppressed sometimes : ah, well, 
we did not doubt that these good friends had reasons for 
not coming into the open. So long as they loved the Chief 
they were our sisters and friends. Again I will say that 
women of the most saintly lives were ardent Parnellites, 
while men, not at all saintly, were his bitter enemies. 

We went home early. My spiritual counsellor said to 
me that day: "Well, well, it's a troubled time. It is very 
hard not to be bitter and angry, but we can try not to be." 
He was one of those priests of the Orders who had made 
it easy for us to keep in touch with Heaven during those 
troubled times. 

What a night ! In the night the storm sprang up. I had 
fallen into a troubled sleep when I was awakened by the 
piteous baying of my St. Bernard. It was a quite unusual 
thing with him, and there was terror and anguish in his 
baying. Then the wind was let loose. It cried as no wind 
ever cried in my experience. Anguish and tears and deso- 

[396] 



THE NIGHT 

lation. The elements were mourning Ireland's Dead, and 
the ghosts of dead heroes were going by. The anguish and 
the trouble of the night and the rain daunted hearts already 
oppressed to the last point of endurance. No one could 
sleep during that dreadful night of keening, keening. 

Anna Johnston and I got up for early Mass. We were 
going to the funeral. We put on our heavy mourning 
badges with a forlorn air and went like widows to the 
church, where the people stared at us. A firebrand curate 
might have told us to take off that crape before approach- 
ing the Altar of God. But nothing happened. Perhaps the 
intervention of Death came as a melancholy triumph to those 
of our enemies who had hearts and souls. Hatred had been 
fed full enough by the last infamy of the "Stop Thief" arti- 
cle that rang in the ears of a dying lion. 

After breakfast we drove into Dublin. We drove first to 
the United Ireland ofifice to pick up some of our party. It 
was still wild and wet. I can see plainly now that October 
morning and the dingy office, and myself standing talking 
with Mr. J. L. Garvin, who had come over for the funeral. 
He was at that time on the Newcastle Chronicle, and John 
M'Grath, the assistant editor of United Ireland, who had 
a huge and well-founded opinion of him, had introduced 
us with a melancholy pride. We stood and talked in low 
tones about the Chief while we awaited the others of our 
contingent. I should not be surprised if Mr. Garvin's great 
enthusiasm, which nothing can ever replace, were, not for 
Sir Edward Carson or Mr. Bonar Law, nor even for Tariff 
Reform, but for Mr. Parnell. 

We had to leave our carriage in a side street and get as 
best we could to the City Hall, where was the lying-in- 
state. Again the indomitable and tiny Mary Fitzpatrick 
was of the party. This time we were a party of women, 

[397I 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

braving that enormous swaying crowd. For some reason 
we had thought we could get close to the City Hall in the 
carriage. 

Dublin had been awake since daylight, and some of it 
all night. In the dark of the morning a procession of 
people accompanied by bands had gone down to receive Mr. 
Parnell, who had kept his word to the letter and had come 
home. 

The rain, the desolation, the crying of the wind ! Some- 
one has told me how terrible it was to hear the coming of 
the bands and the steady march of men's feet through the 
storm in the dark as they came, bringing him home. For 
some minutes the procession halted before the Old House 
in College Green, where he would have led us, a united 
Ireland. Then on again to the City Hall, tramp, tramp, 
to the desolate music, poor mortals whose idol had been 
snatched from them by the Veiled Figure, against whom 
one may cry and rage in vain. 

Again we were in a dense crowd of packed human be- 
ings, this time to see his coffin. It was a very quiet crowd 
except when there was one of those inexplicable swayings 
which are the dangerous moments in a crowd. As we came 
up Dame Street I had seen the terrible black wing of crape 
which swung out from the portico of the City Hall and hung 
above the heads of the crowd. I do not know who was 
responsible for that wing, or I have forgotten. Whoever 
he was, he was a genius. Anything more ominous, more 
terrible than that great black pinion between us and the 
sky I cannot well imagine. It was as though some Bird of 
Death hung with extended wings above us, silent, brooding, 
motionless. 

Some good fellow in the crowd took charge of little Mary 
Fitzpatrick, saving her from being pressed to death. Little 

[398] 



THE NIGHT 

by little we moved on, till someone lifted us on to the steps 
of the City Hall. In turn we entered the Death Chamber 
and stood by the coffin heaped with flowers. The feeling 
was tense. Someone laughed out of sight, a laugh of some 
overwrought woman in all probability; but that anyone 
could laugh, within hearing, hurt one like an intolerable 
affront. 

I do not know how long we spent on the steps of the 
City Hall, while the never-ending procession circled round 
the coffin. We must have been there many hours, of which 
I remember very little, except the poignant shock it was 
to come face to face with Mr. Henry Parnell, who bore a 
striking resemblance to his brother. 

The crowd was very kind. Every man in it was a man 
and a brother, and we were kept in sheltered corners, pro- 
vided with chairs, by the kindness of a total stranger. To 
be sure we were all in one common grief that day. At long 
last the coffin came, carried on the shoulders of his col- 
leagues of the Parliamentary Party. I remember Mr. 
Rochfort Maguire going first down the steep steps, the 
weight of the coffin shifting on to his shoulders. They had 
been tender to the Chief's loathing of the coffin shape — 
that terrible shape indeed which rises between us poor mor- 
tals and the sun, and grows with our growth — and had 
given him a coffin of straight sides. And still the Wing 
of Death hung limp as though the Bird drooped in the sky. 

We drove by a circuitous route to the cemetery, to find 
the grave guarded by Gaels, holding their camans or hurley 
sticks together to make a living barrier. The procession 
meanwhile was treading its slow way through the streets. 
A grave-digger offered me a flower from the grave and 
an ivy-leaf, telling me that the grave was beautifully lined 
with moss. We stood near the grave-head, inside the line 

[399] 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 

of camans. The storm had passed by and it was very- 
still and chilly, the air suffused with a clear green and 
golden light, the autumn evening fast drawing in. Stars 
were looking out of the quiet sky: and a great peace had 
fallen in the wake of the storm. 

At last came the procession and the solemn funeral service 
of the English Church. 

"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He 
that believeth in Me though he were dead yet shall he live: 
and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall not die." 

The voice of the reader was a good voice, and he did 
justice to the glorious words. The great crowd, nearly al- 
together a Catholic crowd, listened in a mournful silence 
to the living words of hope and consolation, while the Gaels 
with their linked camans kept the pressure away from the 
grave. 

The service went on to its close. 

"Man born of a woman hath but a short time to live and 
is full of misery : he cometh up and is cut down like a flower : 
he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one 
stay." 

The coffin was lowered. A woman shrieked, and there 
was a second's confusion : then stillness and the silvery voice 
of the reader. But as earth touched earth — and anyone 
who was present will bear me out in this — the most glorious 
meteor sailed across the clear space of the heavens and fell 
suddenly. He had omens and portents to the end. 

Then we turned about, leaving him to the night and the 
Mercy of God, and went home with the stillness and the 
darkness in our hearts. 

That was the end of one great chapter of Irish history. 



[400] 



INDEX 



Agricultural Organisation So- 
ciety, Irish, 286 

American visitor, impressions of 
an, 14-15 

Anderson, James B. S., 347 sqq. 

Atkinson, Dr., 126, 128 sq. 

Mrs. Sarah, 124 sqq., 131 sqq. 

Avondale, the home of the Par- 
nells, 364-65 

Balfour, Arthur James, Chief 

Secretary, and Mr. William 

O'Brien's imprisonment, 230, 

231 
Barlow, Miss Jane, first published 

work, 128 
Bateson, Mrs., an ardent Home 

Ruler, 353 
Beaconsfield, Lord, and the Tory 

debacle in 1880, 84 
Belfast Riots, 24 
Belloc, Madame, friendship with 

George Eliot, 134 

Miss Marie, 134 

Bible, Catholic version of the, the 

Catholics and, 56, 57 
Biggar, Joe, Trial of, 105 
Blunt, Lady Anne, as hostess at 

Crabbet Park, 338, 340 
Mr. Wilfrid, arrested at 

Woodford, 140, 339, 340 
Bodkin, Matthias, ejected from 

office of United Ireland, 370- 

71 ; Father Healy's joke about, 

375 
Brady, Joe, Invincible, 11 1 
Burke, Mr., Irish Under-Secre- 
tary, murder of, 107 
Burns, John, dockers' strike and, 

353 
Butler, Lady, painter, 332 

Sir William, 332; on the Par- 

nell betrayal, 379 

Caird, Mrs. Mona, on Marriage, 
341 

[40 



Campbell, Lady Colin, and Car- 
dinal Manning, 355 

Cardinal Cullen and Puritanism, 
45, 47 

Manning, 168, 354-55 

Newman, 167 

Carew, James, 104 

Carey, James, informer, 80, 110 
sqq. 

Castle, Dublin, i, 2 

Catholic Church, Puritanism in, 
44-46 

Catholics and Trinity College, 47 

Cavendish, Lord Frederick, mur- 
der of, 107, 268 

Cayley, C. B., and Christina Ros- 
setti, 185 

Churchill. Lord Randolph, at Sir 
Charles Russell's house, 328 

Clancy, John, and Matthias Bod- 
kin, 370 

Clough, Miss, at Newnham, 353 

Cobden, Miss Jane, at Crabbet 
Park, 345 

Convent, Sienna, Drogheda, life 
in, 54. 57-69 

Cornhill, The, 122 

Cullen, Cardinal, 45, 47 

Cunninghame Graham, Mr., 353 

Curran, John Philpott, home of, 
2,7 

Sarah, 2,7, 204 

Cust, Mr. Henry, editor of The 
Pall Mall Gazette, 130 

Daly's Club-House, 2 

Davitt, Michael, and Fenian rising, 
36 ; and Ladies' Land League, 
85 ; released from Portland, 109; 
in Kilmainham Jail, 117; letter 
from, 173 

De Vere, Aubrey, W. B. Yeats 
and, 297 

Dicey, Professor, discusses Na- 
tionalism, 264, 267, 275 

Dickenson, Dean, 274-75 

Mrs., 275 

I ] 



INDEX 



Dilke, Sir Charles, prophesies 
downfall of Parnell, io6 ; plot to 
get rid of Gladstone in favour 
of Chamberlain, i8i 

Dillon, John, trial of, 105 

Disestablishment of Irish Church, 
24, 33 

Divorce case, O'Shea v. Parnell, 
224 

Dowden, Professor Edward, 134. 

Dublin, 52-53 

Castle, I, 2 

Dublin University Review, 162, 
164 

Education, Intermediate, 71 
Elwin, Rev. Whitwell, editor of 
The Quarterly Review, and of 
Pope, friend of Lord Lytton, 
187, 188-91, 192 sqq. 
Emmet, Robert, 38 

Pagan, Charles Gregory, 175-78 

Rev. Henry Stuart, 135-44, 

186, 187, 347 
Fahy, Frank, 281 
Fenians, 36, 47-48, 89, 93 
Ferguson, Lady, 169 

Sir Samuel, 168-69, 269 

Fishamble Street Theatre, 6 
Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 3, 99 
Forster, Mr., 112 
"Foxey Jack," 17, 98, 112 
French defeat, effect of, in Dublin, 

51 
Furlong, Alice, 325 

Gaelic League, 143 

Garvin, J. L., 369; attends Par- 

nell's funeral, 397 
Gill, Mrs. Mary, 167, 322, 377 
Gladstone, Helen, at Newnham, 

353 
W. E., 232; at Sir Charles 

Russell's house, 328 
Gonne, Maud, 363-64 
Goschen, Mr., visits Dublin, 275 
Graham, Mr. Cunninghame, 353 
Graphic, The, 81, 120, 121, 140 
Grattan, Henry, house of, 52 
Gregory, Lady, and W. B. Yeats, 

240 



[402] 



Guiney, Louise Imogen, poet, 327, 

344 
Gwynn, Stephen, 236 

Hardy, Thomas, 343 
Harrington, Timothy, 231-32, 393 
Harrison, Henry, 396 
Hartington, Lord, in Dublin, 275 
Hayden, Luke, M.P., accompanies 

Parnell to Creggs, 391 
Healy, Timothy, Sir Charles 

Dilke' s prediction concerning, 

106, 112, 169 
Hearts, Union of, 18, 210, 227 
Henley, W. E., 296, 297 
Hihernia, magazine, 128 
Home Rule Bill of 1886, 227 
Huddys, the murder of, 92 
Hutton, Richard, editor of The 

Spectator, 82 
Hyde, Dr. Douglas, 236; and the 

Gaelic League, 237-38, 277; as a 

card-player, 323 

Invincibles, The, 93, 109-10 
Ireland, United, 1x6, 370, 375, 397 
Irish Agricultural Organisation 

Society, 286 
Irish Monthly, The, 121, 151, 377 

Jail, Kilmainham, 29, 102-03 

Johnson, Lionel, 217 

Johnston, Charles, 278, 280-81, 
287, 288 

William, of Ballykilbeg, 277- 

78 

Kavanagh, Rose, 222, 233 sqq., 
277, 358 

Kenny, Dr. Joseph, 102, 141, 320; 
at meeting in Rotunda in sup- 
port of Parnell, 372, 394 

Kettle, Andrew J., with Davitt, 
starts Ladies' Land League, 85 ; 
stands for Carlow as a Parnel- 
lite and is defeated, 385 

Kickham, Charles, Fenian poet 
and novelist, 233, 235, 308 

Kilmainham Jail, memories of, 29; 
visit to Parnell in, 102-03 ; visits 
to, 117, 126 

Kilmainham Treaty, 107 

King, Richard Ashe, litterateur 
and lecturer, 228, 277, 320 sqq. 



INDEX 



Ladies' Land League, foundation 

of, 83, 89, 96, 98, 113 
Land League, 18 ; an uninspiring 

movement, 71, 83, 88, 94, 95; 

John O'Leary's dislike of, 224; 

hated by the Fenians, 394 
Land League, Ladies', see Ladies' 

Land League 
Lane, Sir Hugh, gift to Dublin, 

165, 215 
Leamy, Edmund, 104, 395 
Lecky, W. E. H., his tribute to 

Mrs. Atkinson, 124, 128 
Legge, Dr., Professor of Chinese 

in the University of Oxford, 

334-36 
Leighton, Sir Frederick, 331 
Leinster Hall Convention, 388-89 

meeting, 369 

Levy. Amy, 330, 331 

Library, Old, in Leinster House, 

Dublin, 99-102 
Locker, Arthur, editor of The 

Graphic, 81, 82, 121, 122 
Lynch, Hannah, novelist, 88, 116 
Lytton, Lord, 189, 191 ; his invita- 
tion to Knebworth, 193 ; letters 

from, 196-99, 203 

Manifesto, No Rent, 92 

Manning, Cardinal, letter from, 
168, 354; Lady Colin Campbell 
and, 355; last visit to, 355 

"Meredith, Owen," 189-91 

Meynell, Mrs. Alice, 146, 147, 328 

Wilfrid, 146, 147, 161, 328, 

334, 353-56 

Mivart, Dr. George, meeting with, 
357 

Moriarty, Bishop, views on Edu- 
cation and Fenianism, 47 

Morley, John, receives the free- 
dom of Dublin City, 320 

Morris, William, leader of Aca- 
demic Socialists, 279, 280-81 ; 
W. B. Yeats on, 295, 296, 301, 
307; house of, 357 

Mrs. William, at Crabbet 

Park, 345 

MulhoUand, Miss Rosa, 122, 130, 
136, 151, 179, 224, 240, 259, 260, 
261, 264, 279, 317, 361 



[403] 



National Press, The, 382 
Nettleship, J. T.. painter, 346 
New Tipperary, 361 
Newman, Cardinal, 167 
No Rent Manifesto, 92 

O'Brien, Barry, 118, 152, 374 

Charlotte Grace, 206 

O'Connor, Charles, 134 

T. P., 369. 374 

Oldham, Charles Hubert, 162-65 
O'Leary, Ellen, 47, 220-24, 236, 

240. 277, 282, 293, 358 
John, Fenian, 47, 89, 152, 163, 

173, 219-229, 233, 236, 237, 277, 

282, 309, 394 
O'Shea, Captain, 368 
Mrs., 105, 368, 386 

Parnell, Anna, sister of C. S. 
Parnell, connection with Ladies' 
Land League, 85, 87, 96; stops 
Lord Spencer's horse, 97; Pres- 
ident of Ladies' Land League, 
105 

C. S., first appearance in pub- 
lic life, 83 ; personality of, 83, 
84 ; attitude toward Land League, 
93 ; visited in Kilmainham Jail, 
102-03 ; his difficulty with Anna 
Parnell, 105 ; Dilke's deprecia- 
tion of, 106; learns the death of 
Lord Frederick Cavendish, 109; 
the Plan of Campaign and his 
tenants, 140; hostility between 
him and Sir Charles Dilke, 181 ; 
his interview with John 
O'Leary, 224; inaction of, 202, 
319; at Sir Charles Russell's re- 
ception, 328; O'Shea Divorce 
Case, 368; arrival in Dublin 
after deposition, 370; meeting in 
Rotunda, Z7^-7i', his indiffer- 
ence to English opinion, 373 ; 
throws copy of Parnell Move- 
ment by T. P. O'Connor out of 
the office of United Ireland, 374 ; 
Vincent Scully and, 375 ; Dublin 
enthusiastic for, 376 ; Meath Pe- 
tition and, 378 ; Sir William 
Butler and the betrayal of, 379; 
his fascination for women, 383 ; 
fighting the constituencies, 384 



INDEX 



sqq. ; marriage of, 386 ; telegram 
from Mrs. O'Shea to, 386; 
priests' opposition to, 387-88; 
at Leinster Hall Convention, 
388-89; goes to Creggs meeting 
in defiance of his doctor's ad- 
vice, 391 ; his oratory, 392-93 ; 
his patient toleration, 393; John 
O'Leary on the Parnell divorce, 
394 ; his last departure for Eng- 
land, 394; news of death of, 
394-5 ; the burial of, 397-400 

Parnell, Fanny, 114 

Tribute, 117-18 

Patmore, Coventry, 70; Christina 
Rossetti and, 184 

Persico, Monsignor, Papal Legate, 
visits Dublin, 383 

Phoenix Park murders, 107 sqq. 

Piatt, John James, American Con- 
sul at Queenstown, 311, 314 

Mrs. J. J., 311 sqq. 

Plunkett, Count, 128, 167, 383 

Puritanism in Catholic Church, 
44-46 

Purser, Miss Sarah, pamter, 215 

Rae, Dr., 143 

Mrs., 143, 262, 281 

"Red Earl, The," 97-98 

Redmond, John, a frequent visitor 
at the offices of Ladies' Land 
League, 104, 144, 225, 246 

William, in Kilmainham Jail, 

127, 144; in the House of Com- 
mons, 144, 225 

Rhys, Ernest, W. B. Yeats on, 296, 
301 

Rickett, Sir Compton, 186 

Riots, Belfast, 24 

Ripon, Lord, receives the freedom 
of the City of Dublin, 320 

Robertson Nicoll, Sir William, 
330 

Rossetti, Christina, letter from, 
with Time Flies, _ autographed, 
172-73 ; first meeting with, 181 ; 
description of, 182; her life, 182 
sqq. ; her story of Coventry Pat- 
more, 184; her love affairs, 185 

Dante Gabriel, 170, t8i, 184 

William, letter from, 170-72; 

visit to, 181 sqq. 



[404] 



Russell, Sir Edward, 169 

George (A. E.), as a boy, 

282 sq. ; his business life, 284 ; 
as a talker, 285 ; as an organizer, 
286; as a Theosophist, 287 

Lord, of Killowen, 131, 151; 

hospitality of, 179-80; party at 
house of, 328-29; at Crabbet 
Park, 344 

Father Matthew, S.J., ed- 
itor of The Irish Monthly, and 
brother of the Lord Chief Jus- 
tice of England, beginning of 
friendship with, 120-22, 126, 134; 
his introduction to the Meynells, 
146, 167; Frances Wynne and, 
254, 260, 261, 263; tolerance of,^ 
376, 377 

T. W., 279 

Sharp, William, 332, 343 

Shaw, George Bernard, W. B. 
Yeats' impressions of, 306, 357; 
his mother, 357 

Dr., of Trinity College, 129 

Sheares, the brothers, i 

Sienna Convent, Drogheda, life at, 
54, 57-69 

Sigerson, Miss Dora, 144, 240 

Dr. George, 163, 233; pro- 
fessional devotion of, 236; hos- 
pitality of, 241, 277 

Sinclair, Miss May, 217 

Sirr, Major, 3-6 

Smock Alley Theatre, 6 

Spa in Dublin, 52-53 

Spectator, The, 120 

Spencer, Lord, hunting incident,, 
17; stopped in the street by Miss 
Anna Parnell, 97; his Vice- 
royalty, 112, 113 

Sullivan, Mrs. Alexander, 210-14; 
in London. 333, 344 

A. M., 84; his story of 

Beaconsfield, 84 ; poem on, l6g 

Mrs. A. M., 143, 152 

Mr. T. D., 230 

Thompson, Miss Skeffington, 143^ 

262, 281 
Tipperary, New, visited, 361 
Traill, H. D., 342 
Tribute, Parnell, 1 17-18 



INDEX 



Trinity College, i ; Catholics and, 
47 

Union of hearts, i8, 227, 230 
United Ireland, 116, 370, 375, 397 

Verrall, a. W., 353 

Walshe, Bee, 87, 88, 1 16-17, 136- 

37 
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 163 
Wilde, Lady, 49, 147 sqq., 298 
Wilde, Oscar, 149; on Irish 

geniuses, 150; early poems of, 

151, 260, 345 
William, 150 



Williams, Alfred, 317 
Wyndham, Sir Hugh, 338 

Miss Pamela, 338 

Wynne, Frances, 242-66 



Yeats, J. B., painter, 206, 213-15, 
228, 291, 342 

W. B., 116; and Longfellow, 

120, 162 ; as a boy, 165-67 ; reads 
Chapman's Homer, 217; George 
Russell and, 218, 219, 236, 239; 
and table-rapping, 240, 258, 289 
sqq. 

Young, Lady, 269, 272, 273 

Sir George, 275 



[405] 



C 73 89' \ 




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HECKMAN 

BINDERY INC. 

^ MAR 89 



